of man, ghost, and newsbeast
By seannelson
Tue, 01 Oct 2013
- 446 reads
Though separated by a moat of white-hot light,
Pavlov's dogs no less brookishly drool
over Schrodinger's ying-yang colored quantum cat
as meowing fiercely
he swervingly escapes
from the slowly lifted card-board box of physics lore,
before fleetly bursting for liberty past
the languid-stanced commanding scientist
with his dashing white rubber-gloves
and coral-blue designer lab-goggles,
who debonairly gives our feline sub-hero
no chase save
with his diamond-sharp soft saxon-blue eyes
and his precisely seizuring electric-pen hand
airily notating the manifested feline's smallest changes:
her hydration, eye dilation,
length and pitch of stress call, etc.
Also, another white lab-ghost
(this one twitching in sweat-bathed terror
deep inside his hazmat bubble-castle,)
was armed with a video-camera
which followed quantum physic's famed feline enigma
as she made her nervous run
past layers of yellow-restricted tape
to pass between two imposing "neo-degenerate" sculptures,
which briefly blocked the probing camera lens
and stalled the art-curious cat madame,
despite her "fight-or-flight" condition,
but only for nano-seconds
before she was speedily swerving deeper
and deeper down the vast and velvet-soft grass plain,
before finally jumping on a bum-empty bench
to defiantly look back at the place
of her soft yet mysteriously chilling confinement
To her great relief,
not a single ghost had followed
and nor did the bookish-young bipeds
scattered across the university green
eye her with any but languid wandering eyes,
mostly belonging to lithe and handsome young couples
sitting or meandering
under those cloud-circled spear-like ivory towers
they someday dreamt to scale,
though now content charm-offensing one another,
tactically courting, spying, serenading,
hypnotizing with spinning guitar-chord emoto-bit-chains,
deftly and flatly floating coreless rubber-frisbees about
their family-line diagrammed social-circles,
debating Machiavellian market-plays,
or just innocently negotiating the tawdry-tender terms
of casual sex, deviant love,
and of course trendy post-orgasm fixes
as well as occultic dark-hours commerce-caps
Meanwhile,
back by the satellite-grasping Science scraper
with its tank-dwarfing monolithic frontal-facade
of horribly and diabolically dull
though eye-burningly reflective identical spook-tinted panes,
some ghosts
had taken off their macabre ritual armours
and even their blue-mouth-cupped lab masks
to drink and cup-clash icy Napoleonic-era champagne,
as other pseudo-empiric white-gouls cheerily
danced and boxed
with microphone-headed reporters,
who on this rare occasion
posed no poison-pinioned questions,
nor did they synchronistically spin-roll jackal eyes
with each other
upon unfamiliar thus hopelessly archaic replies
or ratings-risky, pop-parched scholarly scum-hacking
No,
on this long-awaited day
of tectonic-meme-shifting,
these buzz-crazed press-primitives now
struck none of the usual drilled-to-robotic emotive gazes,
poignantly massaged no make-up guilded brow-furls
while sexing up some tedious but unavoidable story
about hunger-striking, mass-scale rehab fraud,
or noisome old world elections
But rather,
they patiently queried
these white-coated prophets
as if every noun or nuance
might inform and addictively pique
their own countless-screened city-seas
of news-sex-and-bubblegum hungry viewers,
not to speak of
those Zeus-powered yet black-hole-profile censors,
and essentially of course
this safe yet eminent story
promised to sate the bizzarity-thirst
of each paper's or net-work's
jack-boot tall golden-skinned spin-goblins
But above all these noble aspirations,
the news-beast lusts,
plots, and prays to intrigue or entrap
one of those
rarely witnessed board-room arch-demons,
which are nonetheless mythologized
to every now and then
(sporting decadently demur Picasso-priced silk-ties)
slum-stroll about the tawdry lower-floors
slurping-up and sinisterly snarling about,
exciting buxom blondes and freezing blood
as pleases their dread-divine right
and inscrutable imperial whim
And it was in the opaque cigar smoke
of a cozy and informal coven of these last,
where marble-shaking, fiendish shrieks of "aye"
carried and coronated this big-story
of the Schrodinger cat's demise or re-birth,
was carried for half as many reasons
as the banquet-room had red pike-like horns,
but was also carried out of a uncanny coven instinct...
pointing their long gnarled fingers
at maps and grotesque charts,
while debating anything from restoring "the liberal arts"
to median American inferiority-complexes
and just how,
from these multiplying fear-engines
the greatest profits in liquidity, conformity,
and even breakthroughs in zombie-like mind-control
might be achieved
And we may surmise
but shall never really know
by what craven calculus or aesthetic blood-feeling,
the random survival or death
(and sweetly rivetting possible test-animal escape)
of our captive sub-hero
was slated as the biggest story of the year,
but we can more or less know
that the seas of news consumers
will fall in waves of endless fascination,
for in the unhallowed deliberations
of these secret occultic councils
(at which more than a single
ambitious mid-level manager
has become a barbequed side-dish,
according to many off-the-record accounts
given by numerous debauched and gem-strewn
young lady promotees.)
Yes, there is in coven thought and culture
a certain macabre fore-sight,
some uncanny sith sense
about what sort of sordid,
yet mostly sanitized montage
of trivial events, talking-head-cases,
background music and catnip prejudice treats
gives we masses of news-consumers
that impotent yet strangely pleasant sense
of an epic yet mechanistic news narrative,
the kind of perspective-sickened cycle
which the countless divided millions
(will sleeping and waking)
hear credently in every changing year
as a unifying, carnival-lit symphony,
realistic enough for Prozac-addled book-worms,
but sugary, crass, and sensationalist enough
for any waddling or strutting sub-species
of socially-acceptable American meme junkie
Yes, considering how little we know
of all this,
more may be known by
our feline sub-hero:
the descendant of ancient Egypt's
revered temple-cats,
whose myriad beautiful if cryptic statues
our kinkily-curious scientists
found strewn about death-trapped Necropolii,
still clutched by time-eaten skeletons
or simply left by fearful surviving robbers
along with over-maimed compatriots
in favor of ruby-eyed sand Samurai,
emerald-encrusted scorpion spirits,
and golden kitchenware left for the luxury
of Ancient World shaping royal gourmands,
upon mortality lovingly de-organed
and protectively swaddled
in the finest mummification wraps
created in Millennia of economic competition
among the sand-fiercened merchants
of their wealth-flooded Nile superpower
Finally returning to our sub-hero,
we find her exposed to a fascinating
though strange and anarchic new environment.
Used to the safe and monastic science establishment,
Schrodinger's lady is bursting
with long-deprived passions, senses, and hungers.
The latter pleasure is easily acquired
by a tour around a Freshman dorm
where she savors abandoned chicken-legs
and also tries sushi and kous-kous
with bold culinary curiosity.
Not as convenient but more exciting
is the fat lagging pigeon
she manages to ambush
by the Peace Studies building,
though seeing a glaring hook-nosed man
in a window above,
she drags her prize about campus,
dodging possibly dangerous film-crews
and reluctantly the adoring attentions
of a handful of sweetly-cooing lady students.
Finally safe on top of the History Building,
she enjoys the peaceful perspective
while piece-by-piece de-feathering and feasting
upon gamy morsels
more delectable and empowering
than any butter-soaked lobster
or intoxicating cat-nips she'd encountered
in her scientific life or before,
as if captivity's soft melancholy
and even time's long, oft-savage progression
strengthens a cat's inner sun
and teaches the need to shine
brave and bright,
lending joyous light to each living day
before the return to night and clay
Looking out now
in a moment of safe and fat serenity,
Schrodinger's cat saw many things,
creatures, and happenings,
some which posed questions
paralleling those of her learned namesake.
In the distance,
beyond the white-light moat,
she saw the hulking distant forms
of Pavlov's shock-collared hounds.
Normally their sight would seem repugnant:
chilling yet also pathetic,
these scourges of the noble cat race
so malformed by unnatural selection
as to be capable of survival only in slavery
But remembering human caresses
and her own assorted predatory forays,
she felt instead a bitter-sweet empathy,
a compassion for their degraded state
mixed with disdain for those humans
who though blessed
in their mastery of nature,
sought ever greater poisonous powers,
striving to know and control all
without loving or understanding anything.
Even her small feline mind
saw the self-infecting futility
of such a sadistic and soulless path.
Yet as the setting sun
painted sky and cloud
in Xanadu's pink and bluish hues,
our hero sensed
that for all its strangeness and depravity...
the world also teemed with love
and mysterious beauty
running through town, stream, and field
soothing even tattered beasts
and showing us higher dreams
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