The Ivory Tower

my knowledge--best thriving on card-board
livers and gray-veal pages--
is the Ivory Tower.
I am the gloating resentment of everyday.
I am silence, its disconcerting
narcissism. In a corner, watch me swell
and redden, explode in finite,
twinkling
ideas.

I am the Ivory Tower,
its quiet intellectuals, grateful liberals who
only see torture in novels and
historical
accounts. Our language is slow and painful.
we have white skin, like the sick, imposing
Aryans.

we live and breathe and communicate within
walls
inside, stifled, deliberately choking on
knowledge. we know war through
Hemingway, violence through Palahniuk,
drugs through Hunter S.
but none of these we know through
ourselves

these walls--
white ivory, pure and untainted--have, like curtains
drawn themselves
and closed.

we venture out only
when it is safe

The Death of Finality

ideas,
bubbles in the universe
swinging
on bus stops
in paperbacks, on
desks carved in heart-strings.

foucault had them,
as did aristotle and atwood. beauvoir blew
voice into the swift, catapulting
balloons of shifty
ones.

platonic ideas--floating above us?
like air-circuitry; a network
of flying
knowledge?
kantian dreams; morrison bleeding
with heroin
and bukowski sewing
stories out of
dismissal slips and empty, shivering
wine bottles.

in understanding we are lost,
in finality,
stranded in doubt.
in the unconnected, vibrant waiting, in the
not-yet and the not-to-be
in the never-was and
never-will
we are the always-here.
always waiting, catching circles of thought--idly and
ideally--in our palms like
unfinished, string-thin dreams.