You open, on a table by the door,
AN ALBUM   of people who lived before
Beneath these posts and lintels holding high
A shingle to deflect shots from the sky,
The monotonous rain, the wind that peels
And cracks, the icy pelts like needles' steel,
The snow that breaks the back. Photos mounted
On Kodak stock when that detail counted
Before digital and computers cloned
Every person with a handy phone
As their own Liebowitz or as Man Ray
To chronicle the unattended day,
Record that later on a glance might see
Human error, perverse but malice free.

And on the first page see a beaming dad,
The family eyes, like Art Carney had,
His last name the same as that actor's turn
As Bruce Wayne foe, though dad's first name was Vern;
A scientist, he worked at the Bell Labs
In Princeton, with career utterly drab
Except in '57 when he helped
Produce a Warner Brothers co-developed
Movie titled Gateways to the Mind, and
Went berserk one morning suddenly when
He saw a Chuck Jones cartoon on a screen
Perpetuating lies that made Dad green,
About how human consciousness commands
The body, not the other way around.

"Pernicious superstition"'s what he said,
"Man's not a dangling puppet, life from dead,
Who moves because the burrowed mind controls,
Directing this and that, a ghostly soul,
Repositry of being, flitting wide,
The gooey filling trapped on our inside.
A figment of perception makes it seem
All this descriptive chatter in the bean
Directs our perfect organism when
The opposite is plain to any Friend
Who ever sat in pew and waited words
To form in quiet tissues. It's absurd
To say first, 'Fire the arrow!' to my hand,
Which plucks the string unsignalled, understand?"

His radical behaviorism was
Obsession to the scientist because
He lost so many friends on its account
Not quite getting what he was on about.
And for a time Vern lost Antoine, his son,
Next picture in the album you've begun,
Who brought his darling Olga home to show
The old man what fire in the loins can do.
Misunderstood Vern looked at her and said,
"Your body's disconnected from your head."
Disapproval is all that Antoine heard,
They fled the house before a second word
And left the old man muttering,"How sad,
That words are all we have to mean, 'I'm glad!'"