Toll - Bruce Moody

[Larry Robinson]

Toll

Where were you when the bell clanged done?

Like me among the scattered morsels?

Why should the young co-ed
not feel she will live forever,
she who has so much living for her body yet to do?

Her immortality has not yet reached
its grand climacteric,
and a thousand parturitions wait in line for her years and attention.

The hedges of campus life
are sailed over by no known horse.

She must abide in the cubbyhole of her affection
the grey-getting locks of a certain few
of those who profess to teach
her dates and figs of ceremonies 
of culture, history, biology, and math that will serve her
in no way whatsoever in the immortal 
mortality to come.

Resign your strictures.
Play the civil host.
You know nothing.
Their faces, their new voices
do not spark with what you gave up a million years ago.

Were you washing the dishes?
Crossing the street from market?
Where were you when the sky fell down?
On the porch? Confiding your body to a towel
that would never let it quite come clean?

Pessimism needs no retort to defend itself. 
You stand alone. 
No one ever had flesh like yours before.

	- Bruce Moody