A.
I am a
collegiate
gargoyle;

I sit in my loft and
I watch and I listen;
I am made of stone and
you cannot reach me and
I narrow my eyes in contempt,
lids lowered, eyes of lead
bearing down on you


N.
I am a bit grotesque but
you can't really see those details,
the cracks and grooves and stone
crumbling slightly and
you cannot reach me although
I may stretch my leaden wings
and crane my cobbled neck
in curiosity or maybe
disdain


A.
you do not
know which, do you
child?  Yes,
child, you
who I look
down upon.
You whom I
have grown to
despise.

That is my former self.
I have seen Medusa's gaze;
I have seen my true
self in the
eyes of cobras,
poisonous


N.
I have seen myself in the eyes of
gargoyles,
stony and cold or more so in the eyes of men,
like gargoyles, empty and soulless
but not in the eyes of a
child, yes
child, with no shame
or remorse
to speak of
and no venom to
spit


A.
yet you whom I
have grown to despise.
I grit my teeth in
simply watching

I
bent-backed with
a brow of black,


N.
bristling and
fuming like smokestacks,
simply watching,
idly observing, I
clench my jaws,
molars clamped together


A.
there was a time when I was small,
small and pink-cheeked and bright
-eyed and simple.
A child.  Simple.

But simplicity is not in the equation
simplicity is not in the x nor the y
nor the hypotenuse nor logarithm;
simplicity is not of calculus,
of the lines of angles
drawn like crooked see-saws;

exposed to the science,
exposed to the radiation of
the sun; no, the moon,
the darkness of the room,
the parameters of space and
the exact algorithm of the
theory of life


N.
exposed to the mystery
exposed to the alluring
danger, that curious pull,
that eager thirst for knowledge or for
comfort or
for things to just
make sense
and I am tainted now;
tinged with theories, with postulations
and propositions

simplicity just cannot exist;
it is not in the clouds nor is it in
the trees I climbed or my shoe laces, tied because
even these things
are complex in nature,
complex in composition


A.
yes, there is the shoelace infinity;
yes, the tree is a pillar of the sky,
by nature.  And naturally,

I am a thing of infinity and sky,
airy, perpetuating,
and riddled with knots; I
am now a shoelace riddle. I

am losing myself in the perpetuation
of the infinite hands of the clock; their
caress is cold like ice, and the for
ever of infinity and ticking is
deafening; dude,

the things that I've heard,
that have hit the bones of my ears,
they hit me.  They have
rattled my bones.
They have turned me to stone.
They have left me a pale grey
of asphalt and ash.
I am the color of the sidewalk;
I am the mad collegiate gargoyle with
perpetuating auditory hallucinations
reverberating through my brain and
I am made of concrete and
these things, words,
musicalities they
are like
dark jackhammers
on paper