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The Intimation Game
by Laura DoomEveryone at school hated the clever girls:
they forced the other girls to care deeply
about sex and its accessories; they instilled
in boys the fear that their world was coming
to a premature end.
The clever girls hated each other:
in their enigmatic worlds, brilliance
is reserved for prodigies--rare, exotic
creatures that define evolution
by defying it. They fly above
the thinning air in isolation,
transcending the mean to attract
opposing sons and their beneficial mothers.
Tell them that genius does not regard itself
as brilliant, but sees the bulb of a lesser mind
as dangerously dull, deaf, and blind;
they will protest their innocence, and dazzle you
with a nonchalance that would constipate
a philosopher.
Tell them that genius knows the value
of everything and the price of nothing;
they will profess indifference, poker faces
flushing as they paint self-portraits
in excuses reminiscent of thermo-neural
conflicts at a Pollock exhibition.
Armed with that unacknowledged knowledge,
these learned minds surrender to instinct
and hate themselves with a passion
that makes religion seem like a force
for peace, and lust a division of labour.
No-one hated the clever girls more
than the teachers, the public service
prostitutes who drove them to dinner
and waited while they gorged themselves
on vegetable soup and the leftovers
from under-the-table sex.
Anyone with half a brain will tell you
that genius is 50% drugs, 40% luck
and 20% calculus; that nous
will always lose out to the house;
that half the globe is logical, the other
half creative. But boys will be boys,
exempt from the marriage of mind
that unites the bipolar divide.
It doesn't take a genius to actuate
the nitrate in the chemicals between us.
04/11/2015 Posted on 04/11/2015
Copyright © 2024 Laura Doom
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Chris Sorrenti on 04/12/15 at 02:13 AM What I like about your work Laura is to expect the unexpected, and this piece didn't disappoint me. All what you said here I played out as a movie in my mind, both entertaining and disturbing. Kudos! |
| Posted by Quentin S Clingerman on 04/12/15 at 07:05 PM For me expresses envy, jealousy, arrogance, self-pity, insecurity by the ton; and the ever challenge between the sexes, as well as among the same sex! Your usual flair for the unique point of view. |
| Posted by Jim Benz on 04/13/15 at 07:16 PM This is almost palpable: "... as they paint self-portraits / in excuses reminiscent of thermo-neural / conflicts at a Pollock exhibition." Which probably sheds some dark light on this: "Anyone with half a brain will tell you / that genius is 50% drugs, 40% luck / and 20% calculus". I once knew someone with half a brain (a victim of extreme surgery to treat extreme seizures) and she'd probably agree. Except in her case, the luck was all bad, the calculus was that of others, and she was no genius. But this poem might be. |
| Posted by Nadia Gilbert Kent on 04/14/15 at 12:16 AM A lot of this rings all-too-familiar to me. It really is dumbfounding how so many are glued to looking at the world as sets of binaries, and even more-so the fact that the more one points them out, the more difficult it can be to break away from them. |
| Posted by Rob Littler on 04/14/15 at 03:18 PM This smarts. |
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