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.