"What Teachers Make" by Taylor Mali

Certain cancerous atheists

Certain cancerous atheists
and shitty movies
tell us:
ideas are infectious.

In your desk, with your notebook,
beside a pacing teacher,
syphilitic seeds begin to sprout,
ideas you may at first doubt,
ideas you may or may not
sooner or later, weed out.

And so as it goes,
we are all overgrown,
overcome, overwrought, overrun
with new thoughts in poor health,
when in good health
we are disposed to none.

You hear of communists
and scientists and racists
and pontiffs under quarantine,

pundits, novelists,
naysayers, and chauvinists
spreading dopamine.

And at the hour,
the bell rings, blaring,
but you don't say shit,

still inhaling and exhaling
the thoughts in the air,
cross-pollinating,
metastasizing,
adventitious.

And sooner or later
all the village grows ill
at the suggestion
that ideas are infectious.

Koalas and the Depressed Idols

I've been thinking lately that I'm need of new idols. Well... maybe not idols exactly, more like people that I find intriguing, and, to some extent, find myself identifying with. At the moment those are Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Walt Whitman—all white males who never married, who, with the exception of Whitman, were depressed throughout much of their lives.

At times when I find myself gravitating more towards pessimism than optimism, I think about that short list and wonder if it needs to change. Whitman, a more recent addition, would probably do me some good to stay. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, now that I'm growing more and more disinterested in academic philosophy, could be let go. But I'm not sure whom I should replace them with... Past teachers? Poets? Relative unknowns? Apparitions? Aspirations?

And koalas? Here's what that's about: They subsist on eucalyptus leaves--which are poor in nutrition and poisonous to most other animals. In a way, humans enjoy a similar relationship with modern industrial and post-industrial society. It's what sustains us, but also what drains us; hardly nutritive, hardly enlivening, but nonetheless the way we continue to subsist and live.

Plus, koalas are super cute.