Georgette Clap-O'Doom wonders what learning is.
by Robert Burdette Sweet
Lolling on the creaky porch-swing quaffing
her evening lemonade with vodka
Georgette Clap-O'Doom muses wondering
Why must most learning be unlearning?
Leaning hard toward osteoporosis,
long through menopause, it's time itself
that questions, she decides, slowly rocking.
Go ask parents who all lie to children-
rotating an ice cube under her tongue-
about God, death, sex, all that matters.
Ask preachers who survive
on misconstructions and duplicity.
She winces at a memory: privates
teased in the rectory by the Father?
her father? her digit or just her mind?
Then ask teachers - a profession she managed
to get fired from. For being too good a shot? -
whose onus it is to support the state.
Or inquire of politicians who manipulate
that state and the President whose task
it is to be led by all the above!
Ms. Georgette Clap-O'Doom wants to shriek,
seeks instead a magnolia near the railing,
reaches to press her talcumed nose within.
She squints at the street lights flickering
between the rubbing, scalloped, broad oak leaves-
We're birds compacting nests of twigs and twine
to incubate piebald falsehoods. Hosts for cuckoos-
Her red-cracked smile tilts in satisfaction,
toasting glossy star-chunks bright between the trees-
brood parasites who lay their presumptions
in other's nests. Life's a series of concealments!
What we don't want to know, we really don't
want to know, choosing for friends and lovers
only those who reinforce our cover-
Ah, the men, the men and the one woman
who all eventually discovered
the treachery of even Ms. O'Doom:
stitching hope into her panties, bra and hose,
a vice so secret only a saint could keep it-
And sustain all loves for only so long
as they support your own deceptions.
Yet be sure, she once insisted, to reject first
to preserve the pose that you made the choice,
and never suppose all could have ended otherwise.
So, sham for yourself a preoccupation-
She salutes the cricket-whirring dark-
It makes no earthly difference what-
The vodka has eased her feigned indifference-
Or adjust to one already offered you
by parents, preachers, teachers, and don
that meaning as a second, luminate skin-
Like her name, though she never admits
to having caught the middle one - And become
a breathing, pissing, fucking quintessence
of presumptions and mendacity.
She snickers at the balls, in modern parlance,
her unlearning frees her tongue to cherish-
But it's the only way to go! Anywhere!-
At least that's how she's decided she went-
Study only what feeds the second skin
with blood and oxygen- Her school marm self
can't resist making use of what real learning
might after all be about - Because
if you don't have an assumption for yourself-
Laughing now, furiously pumping the swing-
nothing and no one will cling to you.
Not even you to your own curious self!-
Georgette feels her gorge rising in panic-
Since, just maybe, that's what the self is,
self is, self is ... guile. Reminiscing,
lurching the deck of her own Titanic.
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rbs@serpentinia.com
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