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.
