Poem: Glitch

 

Glitch

 

a Tower of Babel rose

in shunts and loops,

squinched as it was,

noodle-tight in the dormitory

of a certain human brain and

 

its architectures

tended to refer to ‘voices’which,

if not outrightly stating,

suggested strongly that they--

whatever they were--

seemed stable enough,

representatives of the Id or the I or

the ego or whatever,

and yet still,

 

as they put it,

 

‘it all supervened on a wasp nest

of wrangling centers,’

a ‘cook’s-broth of impressarios’

in which no rational arbiter

swam, sank or floated in adjudication.

 

it followed, therefore,

so they explained,

that no one ‘in here,’

which is to say, the Tower,

thought things through wisely,

or blessed whatever action the ‘shells’

(another term they liked besides ‘voices’)

eventually decided to take.

 

in light of all this, this glitch

in the flow of my consciousness,

i concluded there were these, what were, in effect,

byzantine labyrinths

going on in my head.

moreover and most critical,

their sly dance was the prestige of the trick--

that mysterious magic which  

the doctors referred to as  “self-determination.”

 

in the end

 

the doctors and legals

and philosophicals

who pranced in intellectual gaggles,

while deigning to scratch

the flat of the black square on top of their heads,

they said

that the voices and shells and ‘salads’ of the Babble

were radically alert and fully functional--

a situation sure and eager, so they diagnosed,

to dangerously contrive.

 

 

 

 

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6/16/25 ... shortened an awkward polysyallabic

6/5/25 .. fixed typos