Earlier on
he stole the answers,
crept down in the cellar
and fucked the furnace.
On the exam to end all exams
he did as well as one might have expected:
ate all the cream off the top
of the biscuits. People would laugh
at him, though behind his back. His was the smugness
we speak about in retrospect,
the way we analyze our Presidents.
He’d sit in his room,
as quiet as Churches,
listening to the pitter-patter and the scurrying,
and all by himself
he would rearrange the universe.
He would take the flatness
and make it curvesome, scatter pepper
as if a sneeze were the answer,
eat bits of bagel with cheeses
putting galaxies where only singularities had existed previously.
In his dreams, which, perforce, went back
to the very beginning,
he was the cynosure, the big honcho,
in a universe which was not, like ours, a hiccup,
and if psychopathology could be explainable,
this was the actualization of every
repressive instinct since Adam
and Africanized bees spread north, like winds of the sirocco
from where the Garden of Hesperides
dropped apples,
and is remembered for its dragons,
and for the AIDs-like virus that done-in Hercules
and all the other heroic schmucks
who thought they had a theory.
“It won’t be long before we have a theory of everything.”