Insatiable as the locust's, which devours A season's care and labor in an hour. He stripped these fields and ate them, but they made No meat or fat for him. And so he lived On his own thought, as starving men may live On stored up fat. And so in time he starved. The thought in him no longer fed his life, And he had withered up the outer world Of man and nature, stripped it to the bone, Nothing but skull and cross-bones greeted him Wherever he turned—the world became a bottle Filled with a bitter essence he could drink From long accustomed doses—labeled poison And marked with skull and cross-bones. Could he laugh As mother laughed? No more! He tried to find The mother's laugh and secret for the laugh Which kept her to the end—but did she laugh? Or if she laughed, was it so hollow, forced As all his laughter now was. He had proved Too much for laughter. Nothing but himself Remained to keep himself, he lived alone Upon his stored up fat, now daily growing To dangerous thinness. So with love of woman. He had found "thou" the jug of wine as well,      "Thou" "thou" had come and gone too many times. For what is sex but touch of flesh, the hand Is flesh and hands may touch, if so, the loins—      Reductio ad absurdum, O you fools,      Who see a wrong in touch of loins, no wrong In clasp of hands. And so again, again With his own tools of thought he bruised his hands Until they grew too callous to perceive When they were touched. So by analysis He turned on everything he once believed. Let's make an end! Men thought Excluded Middle Was born for great things. Why that bulging brow And analytic keen if not for greatness? In those old days they thought so when he fought For lofty things, a youthful radical Come here to change the world! But now at last He lectures in back halls to youths who are What he was in his youth, to acid souls Who must have bitterness, can take enough To kill a healthy soul, as fiends for dope Must have enough to kill a body clean. And so upon a night Excluded Middle Is lecturing to prove that life is evil, Not worth the living—when his auditors Behold him pale and sway and take his seat, And later quit the hall, the lecture left Half finished. This had happened in a twinkling:      He had made life a punching bag, with fists, Excluded Middle and Reductio, Had whacked it back and forth. But just as often As he had struck it with an argument That it is not worth living, snap, the bag Would 

 Prev. P 19/125 next