KNOWLEDGE
is one thing to the middle-age guy
crossing checkboxes in the food court,
printing BA. for highest degree earned
in a job application for Salad Works;
another, for the kids that spread out
two tables down and are back and
forth cell phone to school work.
One, like a hi-tech, lovelorn schmuck
waiting a love note, has smudged
the screen ten times at least, keyed in
passcode, scrolled down, up, down
to come up empty, I guess, the way
he quickly presses the sleep button,
puts the thing down. Another one
has flipped her Blackberry three
times just to let it rest face down
and mop her textbook with a highlighter.
They’ll wash whole pages in so much
see-through fluorescence, let soul slip
in its dark night, it would startle, freeze
like deer in headlights. I see those guys
big guys, who turn to a reflective strip
bobbing in tunnel and fade to air horn’s
blast. So I guess to me soul’s the flicker
of indeterminate work, with track rats,
danger, dirt. These kids, like clerks
with pricing guns on clearance day
will chisel tip and color-code whatever
comes their way: pink for the gunners
on the dock-board track at Passchendale,
purple for genocides, green all over
Dustbowl, yellow for Black Tuesdays.
Not one Simonides amongst them,
no theatres of memory, forecourts
chambers. Face Time for one instead;
LOL’s BRB’s TTYL’s for others.
They’ll trim the bitumen of ziggurat,
patch the cracks of Wailing Wall with
Lego-like chromatic, hedge famines
tidying the take over of tuff and weed,
where knowing begins as weed overgrows
Empire’s crop and anything will do, fryer, mop…
Ask the guy who’s moved down another
franchise and is thinking mortgage, food.
He would color-code, if at all, like snake
licking the odor from the air just to get
a quick quiver in the threshold of infrared
that means disquiet, heat, blow, meat.
She’s checked her phone again. Turquoise
warped a page full with soup kitchens.
No Simonides. Let edifice collapse,
none shall know who is in the wreck.