Poem: Normalcy Glitch

 

Normalcy Glitch

 

there were various salads,

striving to become words, a regular

Tower of Babel, except it rose

in random shunts and loops,

squinched tight in the noodle-dorm

of a certain human brain.  and

 

such forces tended to refer to voices,

implying if not stating outright

that they--whatever they were--

the ego or the I or whatever--

seemed stable enough,

and yet

 

as they put it,

 

supervened on a wasp nest of wrangling impresarios,

with no rational arbiter for adjudication.

 

it followed, they explained,

that no one ‘in here’ thought freely

or blessed whatever action ‘the shells’

(another term they liked)

chose to take.

 

there were all these, what were in effect,

byzantine labyrinthine machinations,

these goings-on.  and

 

that was the prestige of the trick--

that was the entire phenomenon

normally defined as “self-determination.”

 

but

 

all the legals and doctors

stood around in intellectual gaggles,

scratching the flat of the square pedestal on their head;

because somehow, some way,

the salads and voices and maestros of the Babble

were all too alert and functional,

all too sure and eager

to dangerously contrive.

 

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