Amygdala

We defame the blind,
by invoking them as a trope
for ignorance. With the deaf
it is much the same;
I have tutored the deaf,
and lectured the blind
and I find them
far better students
than those whose ignorance
is self-inflicted.
People with ear-buds in don’t want
to listen; it is a choice
against openness, albeit
a choice to connect,
at one and the same time
to sever yourself from your
locality, and attach yourself
to the pod, the download,
the matrix of what you have
pre-decided
you want. It’s like
what Sontag said: blindness
shouldn’t be a metaphor
except that metaphor itself
is a kind of illness.

In the library,
a young male employee is
dusting the shelves, and
listening to his i-Pod.
The body language
is ecstasy: the job rents his physique,
but his mind
is exquisitely, Jeff-Goldblum
his. I need directions, but
who am I
to ask, to inter-
rupt the feast of his consciousness
with my foreign
if all-too-human
needs?

There are profits
in the arbitrage
of attention, and prodigious
slotting fees in the free market of ideas.

Friends, co-imperialists, countrymen,
rent me your earbuds.
We are free to hear
what we want to
or not, but I note
there are reasons
for the neural pathways
from you ears
to the fear centers
in your amygdala.

How do you know
the alarm
hasn’t
already sounded?