| Ignoramus 7-1-2by Martin Jack
 The rows of widened pupils gather for the hour,Their teacher powering the interlink, waiting for its tether
 Collective knowledge moving from neuron to neuron
 Saturating the empty vacuum that lies in-between
 Kept free of influence until the tender age
 When totalitarian values can carve their way.
 
 The children awaken from their intellectual slumberTest tube experiments freed from their whim of instinct
 Wide grins looking forward to a future
 Of administrative challenge in the bland linear offices
 Where the personality matrix will be molded
 Drill instructors dressed in the uniform of high finance warfare.
 
 There are many schools from which to chooseMany opportunities waiting for the vacuous fetus
 In which parental choice will hold reign
 Leaflets polluting the spatial highway called education
 But there are some incurables amongst us
 The foolish and the idiocy delegated by numbers.
 
 7-1-2 lives his life in eternal institutionForgotten by parents and unforgiving students
 His given name long since deleted
 For now he is a number along with his ill-educated brethren
 Just another genetic statistic for the Center to analyze
 An abomination that society winks his prejudicial eye upon.
 
 His plain grey clothes announce his defrockingFor not even brightness wants any part of him
 It would prefer to adorn the highest in the land
 Instead of the plainest lad, the blandest of the bland
 7-1-2 lurches forward in his wooden wheelchair
 Dreams of the cosmos, dusted by despair.
 
 His mind's eye winking through the narrow lens of the telescopeWondering if unconditional love is out there somewhere
 Somewhere he might be free
 Released forever from the existence of solitary
 For humankind he has long since denounced
 Unburdened by the possibilities of finding something alien.
 
 His home a prison in which he cannot blossomAnd so he waits to be released like the cross-pollination of a flower
 But the authorities keep their tightened hold
 Inject him with drugs; alkalize his dreams into cerebral mush.
 His wheelchair existence continued by hate
 And by the attempt to keep his kind at bay
 For the racial tension are building, riots instigated
 The privileged vs. the dyslexic for control of their fates.
 
 © 1999 Martin Jack
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