Dr. Seuss trees are native to this region
But the indigenous in caves put the curse on anyway,
Even the flightless cormorants -- whose babies are black
Or ash-grey, poking at blue necks with beaks like pliers.
Sea lions dance in what once was the land of holes,
The sacred Kumeyaay portals of birth, where kayakers now
Joust for an inside view ... but keep their distance, as seals spin
And laugh at them, blow out fountains of brine.
Horizongoers wander onto the guano-colored spit to take selfies
As pelicans swallow. There's a stair through the red rock, film-noir dim
On wet wooden planks 144 steps down to an elven face outlined
Like a magic jigsaw door in granite otherwise endless …
But the only things endless now are the Soviet Realism halls on campus,
Where neural circuits go to be reprogrammed and a brutalist
Spaceship holds the records for the best and brightest
With working apps and scalable plans by their senior years
Or they bring shame upon their D&D encounters and families;
Others more realistic think the beach with purple trees is the place to be
Homeless or a permanent student, though even they have lost hope
On new knowledge as all the subfiles have piled up.
Yet if there's one who knows there were bones below here from
38,000 years ago you would never know it, from their etiquette.
That's what academics are like, as proud of their ignorance
As guilty there are others as smart as them
But it's less than 1% of the population even attempt to get in
This prison of the children's book, about an equal percentage as
The landmass of Maine's apportioned, or better yet, what no one says
The Universe itself peoples in much smaller fractions.