Tereus Is Dead

How can the pithy noble face anointed thus  
Be subject unto deep and weary presages—
Some blind compassion, another rude forsaking, 
To be subject to the billets of antiquity 

Before his dreams have dared decayed into
Prolixity, a rubble babble, euthanasia, thoughts
Unprecedented yet the pains exist too tangible to
Care to wish away—but to be able to. 

The book no longer stands for learnedness. 
The hoopoe has become the one without a tongue. 
Lavinia casts out curses and the speech of one of language
Is ignored. 

He walks throughout the universities, insignia, 
The mind that was once pledged to fixity shot
Downwards, and the sickbeds are replete with all his
Feats. But he wanted us to know—

Perhaps enforced it, menacing. 
Superiority is never met with tender silence
And all the minor-mode rebukes—he can only hear,
And everybody listens.

What is it to have a brain prone to explosion,
Ideas once an emblem of discovery now
Become short-circuited—defective. He would have
Been annihilated in another state, yet here 

Where free speech reigned, differences embraced, 
Some differences are concupiscently invisible. 
He blunders silent, setting down the paraphrases that no
One can hear, will ever hear, or know.

Another bill paid in the name of mister doctor.
Tell me now, where precisely stands research— 
They walk around with shrunken sucked cigars, 
Balloons inflated, holes cut into different places,

Yet another bill paid in the name of mister doctor. 
Progress is impeded. Yet once they could have listened, 
Now his work pathetic, sunken dialects of dying languages.
German was once a sign of aristocracy. 

We cannot speak, and you have let us dead. 
But that is just an idle thought. He retrieves his briefcase, 
Stumbles home—avoids holding the door for the
Approaching wo—to bed.