When Old Man Bruggers lost his mind
we lost utopia.
It started with his crazy war
on fecophobia.
This is morbid, but in the winter
sometimes I go outside
with a round-point shovel
and scrape and pry at the crust
just for a peek under the surface,
just to see if anything down there
is still alive.
It's a fearful thing to love a statue,
returning every day to circle the dais
and study again every immortal curve—
unyielding, immutable, awesome. At first
you marched round and round like a supplicant:
incanting, worshiping the platonic form
of beauty. But now you circle like Joshua
around Jericho: tooting horns, listening, watching
for the crack, the one hidden flaw
in the stone. Because loving a goddess
or a human clad in myth
means this secret seam stretching unseen
is your one sacred hope. Pass after pass,
prayer after prayer, what mortals couldn't
stir seems—maybe this time?—to quicken.
They smoke and model their berets while all
their code recurses infinitely and
will choke, will suffocate on out-of-memory