Statistical Den

“It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.”

― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Mother stands stock at the gates

invigilating

the slow submission to the grind

and the automatons push their

own squealing offspring into fresh pens.

“Heaven knows how many heads are manipulated into one,

taking childhood captive,

and dragging it into

gloomy statistical dens by the hair.”

These piglets will never see a face in the moon.

Nor a caterpillar with a pipe.

Never visage a mutuality of a bear and a tiger

or know the feeling, homing to a warm lover.

They will grow to count the grass

And the grains

And the lost

but not the forgotten

And the automatons will smile calmly

In the strength of knowledge

that They Were Right

when those piglets leave the

machine

submit to the fall

and bleed white.