Could you know enough to know that
      you don't know anything about
      any one particular thing at any
      given time?
Enough to feel your mind first mildly
      groping for some association about the
      topic at hand, then scratching in panic
      at its own gray walls for a segue into
      something more familiar?
A subject change.
There sits in Spring a mournful child wishing
      for winter and the necessity of layers,
      the easy task of coercing his mother
      into hugs because without them, he says,
      he'll surely freeze to death, a phantom son,
      a display case of old human progeny
      from the time before love was outlawed
      and before the babies were made with
      chemicals, when they were made at all.
Those future children will die with no
      souls, no prospect of ghosthood, no
      morals and no literary merit.
They will flinch from fiction and pound poetry
      into the ground with steel-toed boots, spit
      on the remains, pretend to dream with their
      government-issued flashcards, scenes
      from movies projected on billboards in silence,
      ears ringing in the quiet but for the
      occasional puttering along of a society so
      advanced, it doesn't know what to do with itself.