Lecture

I was asked to provide instruction,
told it didn’t matter on what;
this assignment was posed to me with the assumption
obvious that I am expert in something, anything
and it occurs to me that I am not.

Would it be useful if I were to explain to you
how I came to this conclusion? I think I can do that.
My father used tell me he would much rather
employ a clever lazy man
than an energetic numbskull. Given the choice.

We used to like to argue these hypotheticals:
whether sincerity was virtue
or at least a mitigating factor for evil,
also whether this world we lived in was heaven
or hell — fun stuff like that.

Oddly, he said he could forgive mistakes,
even grievous harm done, in genuine delusion.
He found disingenuous saints more appalling
then earnest, authentic, whole-hearted monsters
who were simply blind to their own monstrosity.

I could never work out how this moral calculus jibed
with the seemingly contradictory preference
for the clever lazy over the rigorous stupid.
We once agreed, my father and I, about pluralism
that it was very confusing.

But that was only very briefly
in 1987. That might have been the last time
I thought myself expert and that wasn’t — in —
anything I could translate into a tangible asset,
anything I’d share, anything I’d ever wish on anyone really.

There was quite a while where I was convinced
the most important thing you could do was escape
Desire. Never simply sated, at different times I’d advocate for
starving it out or smothering it in excess.
It was always a dangerous ember, always dry season.

This theory didn’t survive.

The last time I tried my beatnik-buddha bit out on someone
my good friend Terence told me I was full of
— as he put it — “shite.”
He said he much preferred suffering at the hands of Desire
to not suffering at all.

I’m not sure I understood him, but he and I both agreed
I shouldn’t lecture on anything.