STUDY I.
Study: an astringed pore.
It can tell, or
A crowded carrot in an unthinned patch;
Or tamped and trampled rocks in a roadbed;
Or a pea not rolling free in its own identity,
But sieved to size from pot to pot
and tightened into a tin,
Or split and intermingled, mashed and mangled,
As in old "Pease porridge hot" ...or cold,
Like words in the poem of pattern and patter,
Tortured into a moldy mold;
Or like feminine flesh, a played-over,
Trussed and girdled and made-over distortion
Into some popular proportion:
(Here thinner, there fatter)
Padded, powdered, painted to match--
(To match what doesn't matter)
A fad of hair for a thatch.
Study II:
Study: the plump pulp of a plum
in a crinkled prune-skin;
It could teach of such a squeeze.
Or the unremitting wheeze
from a tar-scarred lung,
Or the press of the wrinkling skin of an earth:
The force of its cratered excrement;
Or the contractions of a birth,
The bitch's howls of parturition
In the whelping of a litter,
Or the drawn tongue when bitter
wine is swilled down,
Or a bitter pill--
These the extent of the freedom of the will.
Study III.
Study:
As much as the electron is free to travel
In its orbit, so infinitesimally tight,
Or the pion and quark to ricochet within,
As the galaxy must glide
in predetermined near-infinite spirals,
As free as rolled-up anchovies in tin.
So must men scrounge out
Their little niches in the walls,
Or their demons their hideous holes
at the ends of gargoyles,
And their worlds spin on their poles.
LESSON I.
Among all the carrots in plots,
Among all the peas in pots,
And all the rocks and pebbles
In the world's worn ways,
And amid the stenches
And stagnancies and decays
And the musty dusts and rots
And mildews of the putrefacted past
And the computefying (sic) present,
The problem is posed, then fast
The brain of man contracts--
the standard spasm:
Comes the reflex thought,
A tic of involute volition
Under habit's inhibition
Will--or its phantasm,
Pandering to the local lord--
Clipped by the provincial sword.
Will, gelded by a Castro,
Crushed by a Kruschev,
Eschewed for a Chou,
Damned by a Saddam....
Will, burdened with bias:
The wrong nose,
The wrong hue,
The wrong tongue--
Will, parried by the party:
Spare the spoils! Favor the nephew!
And the slick greaser of palms.
Will and decision daunted,
Aboulia-bound, fear-fraught will,
Jangled by the jungle of law
And its calculated chaos,
With diplomacy deplored,
then flaunted--
Deployed in the treachery
Of hidden tooth and claw.
LESSON II.
But let a single pebble be pampered,
And watch as new science unfolds.
Let a single molecule stretch,
Then view in awe
Old matter burgeoning as new,
Chain-linking its xenic fibres unhampered,
Free from even nature's knowable molds,
Through cybernetic Merlin bits and bytes and chips.
And free ONE ATOM OF THOUGHT
From the press of mildewed mores and modes
and taboos and codes--
Remove the cell-walls of society's narrownesses:
Let that thought-atom's volume,
Like the volumes of plasmic gases,
Fill the ever-expanding voids of space/time/what?
Unleash one brain-wave: let it storm
Through its own unconfinable career,
And watch it accrete new moment and mass;
Watch it ray out in an infinite sphere
Through the measureless curves
of intellectual space--
Watch it blaze with the fissioning
Of the nuclei of wit:
Its turbulences will transcend
The muted mullings of men flawed
With the anti-knowledge of the hour:
The insipidity of
pseudo-sciences,
The asininity of astrology--
Creationism, cretin-taught--
Biorhythmicizing blither--
Cults, the maharishi, cancers of the mind--
Satan-mongering, faith-mongering fanaticisms...
LESSON III.
Asssuredly, when once de-ecucated
From such twistwitted trends of anti-think,
Mankind will see its reasoning ranging,
Its brilliance beaming to blink out
The waning glint of staling stars
of stolid yores;
Will watch it spiral out and out and out
Beyond the great beyonds...and prod
New-made unmeasured clouds of galaxies
Of super-thought and preter-power,
And all but out-God God?
(C) June 1996 Charles L. Prazak
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