Optometric Solution
America is no longer a simile, like adolescence, wandering through uncertainty.
It is a metaphor of intolerant destructive complacence, the mark of demagoguery.
The transformation is now complete.
Universes pile up to the skylight
They are like the stuff from the attic,
and even to the most discerning eye
have become indistinguishable,
junkyards of wrecked cars, discarded computers,
where all eleven of the parallels described
by physicists look exactly the same to us laymen.
There is a kind of presbyopia afoot
that fuses difference,
makes the distance between one thought
and another imperceptible.
Oh tell me what it will take
to frighten you into a hightened sense of awareness?
These ancient notes, letters, those browned photographs,
stored in the backs of drawers, or mustily,
on the tops of bookcases,
merely awaken one to the ageing process,
merely emphasize the degeneration that time has exacted.
But place? But philosophical positions?
Judgments force-fed,
fat-free and fully formulated, pre-cooked
and microwaved into tasteless messes?
We need, I think, a dictionary of mind,
one that will demand our attention,
which will, like some electric prod, shock
us into ever new positions, a sort of prismatic lens,
a replacement for our old, unstylish glasses,
to move us, if that be required,
from cataracts and proteinaceous jumbles
to strings and branes
and an exponential clarification of vision.
Can you see the sad direction in which we are moving?
Or is this retinopathy so advanced as to be untreatable?