Academia

 

In the cold

We stood blasted of our innocence

Unable to retreat into the pleasure of ignorance

The beauty of the world’s truth laid before us

Contestable joys

Mutable

Our moment of initiation

Has flapped the unflappable

With a wave of cold salt

Wreaked the slap of reins distant

Flayed our minds of certainty

To clutch pages and pages

”All that is solid melts into air”

Before our eyes

Words twist and turn

Begin to mean something else

They rebuke me as they never have before

I gaze around my cohort and wonder

Are they startled by these revelations as well?

Concerned that they too

Joined this mass

Ignorant

Faceless and agentless before they emerged

The objects of mutilations

Denied an agency

Denied a hope

Now refreshed and enlightened

How they had been manipulated before they encountered the persuaders

As though these men of letters had no agenda

As though they were not deliberately entangled in their persuasions

Oh how innocent the tower

Men within the walls dictating their impressions of that which they have never seen

How easy is it to dismiss people upon a page

But not so easy when they sit before you

Engaged

Do you dismiss them

Wrest away their agency as they speak of their pain

Of their sorrow

As these vestibules of the everyday

The carriers of society

These people of who you write so dismissively

Speak of their hopes

Within the paradigm

Are they failed beings

In that they do not understand your infernal workings?

Or are they more whole in that they can take certainty from the hammer in their hands

And achievement from the striking of the nail

While you sit to question the very existence of their very hands

How insipid ye dogs

How sorry your state

How pale your tower

Step down