mervin

I left the university
because I could not stand the taste
of professionally flavored truths
But before I could escape,
I too learned to tell cloying, party colored lies.

I learned to lie and to hate at the
university.

I learned to hate myself for speaking.
My mind had become a factory
at every turning I generated stricture
and limitation.
To speak was to strangle, and it was
not myself,
but you, I injured.
Every phrase I pronounced
was a death sentence,
possibility wilted with my very breath.

I learned to hate myself and even you
at the university.

Because you were idiot enough to listen
and to promote my thinking.
Though we both realized,
that senseless tide of language negated
everything it encountered.

Silence is the only abundance.

We were academic blow flies,
spewing maggots.
While we stared in our magnificent myopia,
our wormy vanities despoiled chaste reality.
We wrecked the university,
we infested the city.

Wherever we pass they gather and listen,
each word draws a drop of blood from the innocent ear,
a tear is born in every witnessing eye.
We fortify our conceit with coffee and nicotine,
while the world beyond our dismal imagination contracts ... smaller then smaller.

We,
not some red demon,
fleshed out in metaphor and childhood terror,
are the fathers of lies and prejudice,
the putrefaction of truth.
And for these affronts we proudly call ourselves
scholars and authors: men of letters.
Though we cry mea culpa, mea culpa
down all the halls of the academy,
how can we coax forgiveness?
Will we be heard by the very ears we ruined,
should we expect blessings from the mouths of our students,
our successors,
our victims, whom we ourselves infected.

No, our pleas will come to nothing
as will all our art.