They attacked her in mid exploration
Cutting away her golden thoughts
As they cut away her flesh, destroying
A mind that they couldn’t destroy in
Debate, a sparkling old woman
Whose thoughts were spun from steel.

The screaming mob desecrated her tiny form
Dragging it into the dust, through the *******
And ****. Tearing off her clothes
The Parabalani exposed her to celestial winds crossing
The arora, rubbing
Spoilt Alexandrian soil into her unexplored ******.  
She did not die as a philosopher, calculating and
Learning, but, torn apart, the old woman
Screamed out for her father,
Terrified, in sacrificial pain so much worse
Than beheadings and crucifixion. Her modesty,
Kept for 60 years, mutilated by a 1000 killers in a single
Minute.

Her head bounced in the forum,
Her arms thrown to the 4 corners,
Her soul stamped into the gutter,
As the new religion cried out for tolerance.
In a morning thinking became forbidden
Books burnt, laughs ignored and fires built for heretics.

Consider for a moment
the Great Library of Alexandria,
a wonder of the ancient world
a pinnacle of human achievement,
a locus of human knowledge,
what with its endless papyrus scrolls
and torch-lit hallways
and hunched, bearded, sagacious men.

Consider now whether or not it
only contained about eighty gigabytes of data.

Consider Jesus.

Consider the thousands of Bible apps
(most of them free)
that are available for download onto your phone.

Consider the different translations that are available
at your fingertips,
each telling a divergent story,
each version of the messiah slightly different
in terms of humanity,
miraculous deeds,
skin tone—
and all of this distilled
into a single, trivial
press of a handheld device.

Consider yourself as you lie in bed
in the dark
trying to pray to God,
but too distracted by the fact
that a text message you sent earlier
never got a reply.

The water recedes again
Nonchalantly walking back to it's home
The smell remains in Old Town
The sewage scent hitchhikes the breeze
To make it's way up the street named for kings
The water will return
and I cannot afford to live here

When she recieved her first 'A', and hung it on
the frigde, they called her Alexandria, and
they chanted the name with pride.

When she tried on make-up for the first time, and asked
her father how she looked, he simply nodded and said
you look beautiful, Alexandria, though she knew he was lying.

When she saw her first naked boy, at a party out in province,
she questioned whether to stay or go. All he had to do was call
her Alex, and her mind was fully made up.

When she smoked her first cigarette after going to bed with
that boy she'd met moments prior, everyone called her Lexi,
whispering it between moans and drags from cheap cigarettes.

Now, on most evenings, outside the local bar, she stands on the
corner, pacing back and forth, and asks herself if that test still hangs
on the fridge, and what they'd call her now...