Here's What You Believe About Intelligence, Today

Your teddy bear grew large enough,
with his expanded lap, to hold you up
and hold you back before you made

the choice to promulgate your final act,

whose repercussions even now exact
your fragmented attention. Here’s what

you believe about intelligence today:

its sway is every bit as analytic as the tests
of it you took believed it was, though

mightily relieved by brave imagination –

whose relation to your teddy bear
is absolute: which is to say: there’s

nothing you have loved or known,
inanimate or prone to pushing you
around, in which you haven’t found

the means of being. And that’s the final
act you’re seeing splay itself across
your stage: whose rage is mitigated

by the cosseting of your enlarging
teddy bear’s fine plush behind. (Your
nap is done now, darling: never mind.)

.