Local Food

Local Food

Industrialized Phdegreed.

“Elite” used to be merely descriptive;
now it’s pejorative: subject to political
correctification.

Used to be in learning institutions of
discrete natural selection there were
no Doctors around; now they abound.

Plenty of PhD’s —sure. But no doctor
to be found. Now they are on check
books and driving licenses, tacked on
to e-mail addresses & business cards
and office doors.

My dental assistant calls me Dr. Scoville
but she’s the only one. Doc Jensen was
called “Doc” because he was the only one:
“stalwart pioneer seeking frontiers yet
unknown.”

I’m just reporting: signs of massive
intelligence all around, seepage from
under ground: oil--enormous stores,
local food-for-thought untapped,
boundless resource. Of course
there will be blood.

Etherealizing
By Robert Frost

A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:
Such as that flesh is something we can slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed.
Then when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that’s left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution’s opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we’ll lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish:
Oh, may the tide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.

“This poem, I used to copy it down and
leave it everywhere. Into stacks of blank
lined paper in the public school, under the
glass table tops in coffee shops, held by a
magnet to our refrigerator door, on my
window in tempera paint so that when
people looked inside or out they would
have to see it.

The first two lines alone floor me –yeah,
everything I think is true, I’ve ascribed
truth to by wanting it to be so:
to be right.

I attempt to slough off my skin every
time I give up sleep or food to read or
write; in pursuit of the intellectual, I
ignore the corporeal and sensual; But
I can’t deny that I am both…”
[and that it goes
both ways.] MR (first yr student):
“Theory of Self”