I write this early two thousand so,
for a friend, in a class, in order to amuse.
If ars poetica has a nobler purpuose, that is news
to me. I trust it not, and bid it go

elsewhere. It's good advice. The lesson's
dull and dry. The teacher's a nice woman, but gives
a scalar lecture: has plenty magnitude, which here can live
without direction. We fiddle with pens.

We need a Happening today, or
sometime soon. Our own devices have long since been
exhausted. We tired of smart-alecks, cutting up - sin
has failed us, no substinence in its lure.

Because, truth told, there is no coping.
How can surfing and skating sound so boring?
How can dynamite and parachuters leave us snoring?
We sit, you sketch, I stare, just hoping

for the speckled ceiling to cave in.
Yes - just now - this second. For the roof's debris
to tumble overhead, for screams and shouts and shrieks, to be
revitalized by complete, heart-stopping

terror that will shake us like a bolt of raw
electricity. And to be drowned in dust.
Dust, drowning Her chalked and our notes with hanged men in the margins, must
also drown the tedium, by the law

of inertia, and, returning it
from whence it sprung, allow it reincarnate.
And then what else might follow? For you must know mischief's bait
is not easily brushed aside. Once lit,

the light shall not be doused. Why can't
those model balls have some fun? They have been cooped
too long. Now they are blinded - intoxicated: they jump, loop,
richochet, fling, roll, spin, whoosh, zing, lambent

in their independent motion, crazed
in their newfound animation. Liberty, too
abrupt, is dangerous. They're out to prove it, knocking first askew
supplies, and then walls. Why not, in this raze

of insanity, alter the ill-
planned edifice? Of all science lesson plans,
this is tops, the ultimate, the pinnacle, the best, hands
down. Pity, though, that none, nothing, and nil

can decipher the whys and wherefores
of all this wonder. Einstein himself would be
stumped. And delighted. Don't smirk. If this impossibility,
why not others? Those men would not be bores

away from history. Not if brought
to life again centuries later. That's it, hey?
Necromancy! The cure for all academia that lay
heavy on us who new life have wrought

for Copernicus, now blinking so
warily at this sudden and strange new room.
Let's shake his able hand, tell him of the scientific boom,
fruit of his triumph so recent ago:

Heliocentrism, in a Catholic school!