Some folks get their kicks on Interstate 285
Fast and furious they display their power
Demanding attention from the motorists
And from the nearby residents
With automotive noise aggression and speed
Mere tokens and not the object of the game
Which is to force notice regardless of consent
That is to annoy
To defeat tranquility
And by victory in speed and sound
To gain recognition
To be seen and heard
To achieve the victory of attention
Say what cause Muse
This craving for the notice of others
What cause could there be
Save the primate need for social belonging
Belonging a necessity for members of a social species
To the band to the clan to the tribe
The ritual of our initiation
The badge of our affiliation
The strange oaths of our platoon
The shibboleths of our narrow province
The colors of our gang
The insignia of our regiment
The embroidered emblem
The old school tie
Striving to increase our status our prestige
In short to impress and by such impression to belong
Bitter self-defeat when we belong already
But belonging fails to satisfy
In a world that values winners conquerors success and size
And how sadly we err when we use value as a verb
And we demand that others praise us as most high
Blaspheming the value that inheres in all persons
And seek to bolster our manifest inadequacy
So we imagine erring
For we belong like or no
Once having survived the night of our birth
We are not foals who stand within minutes
Upon spindly but sufficient legs
We humans must fall and we must again fall
And others have been there to assist us
Else we would not have survived the night
And the tantalizing goal of success
Merely the end of the game
The instant of cessation
A contingent destination
And the vaunted superiority of size
Judge me by my size do you
Merely a circumstance of sexual dimorphism
In vast variation past the petrified composite binary
Scarcely worthy of mention
Godfather of hierarchies
And this erring imagining like all imagining
Takes its place in the one great poem
But forget about satisfaction in the overmuch flux
For we have learned that success
Is a game of skill not merely of chance
And humans depend for their lives upon technical skill
Proficiency with flint and fabric
Unfolding the horizon of modality and of the future tense
Responsiveness to reasons
The sensei and the ephebe
For in reality the social fabric serves not least to nourish
Knowledge in science technology and the arts
And self-awareness self-respect self-esteem
All are estimable not least since humans require each other
And should notice and attend to one another
Should
For we cannot conceive of our sole selves
Except in the company of others
Each a value supreme
None a superior species
And certainly achievements intellectual artistic and athletic
Prove themselves worthy of esteem
But only when we direct them toward general wellbeing
Even as we respect and esteem personhood
For humans belong to a mere species
One among innumerably many
Tigers and algae mosquitos and trees
Albeit a social one its sociality mediated by discursive language
This an evolutionary bequest like any other
No more or less impressive than the liver or a wisdom tooth
Those complex appurtenances
But language in turn bequeathed the gift of counterfactuality
As that which has not happened yet
As that which cannot happen and yet we say it does
Willingly suspending disbelief
Because we can
Illuminating fiction
As the mouse taller than its pet dog
Who resides in suburban dwelling and drives a car
Modestly like a suburbanite
But the mouse can talk while the dog cannot
And they negotiate the challenges
As of love friendship and mechanical failure
So that we recognize ourselves in the monstrous talking mouse
And the counterfactually not-yet future or never-could-be fiction
Unfolds the horizon of decision and consent
As it does let us concede of deception and threat
What we will do
How we will act
The past and the present
They are as they are
And but little we see even of them
But the future is not factual
Not yet
The future is entirely suppositious
On this spherey earth fluxuous part of the greater world
As indeed the past and present mostly are
When we puff up with self-assurance
Self-assurance a far cry from legitimate self-esteem
Which rightly derives from responsiveness to reasons
For given the universality of ignorance
We can give assurances
But we adopt at our peril the posture of certainty
The facts are there but how do we acquire them
Thus we nevertheless enjoy the power
To imagine what the future will be
Get ready to do and to act in readiness
As we can imagine the square root of negative one
And hence our complicated neural apparatus
Gives the gift of imagination
And thence the one great poem
In other words the experience of the sublime
In other words the cleansing of the doors of perception
In other words the improvement of sensual enjoyment
And tense awesome though it be
Gives way to exquisite modality
And especially the noble modal auxiliary should
Should
We have responsibilities to attend to
Not mere necessities
As what goes up must come down
Though that is more a regularity than a necessity
And somewhat of vertical tyranny
Or better seven plus five must equal twelve
Must
For transcendent facts must be true
As goes without saying of necessity
But necessity by no means exhausts
The modality of existence situation and event
In the phenomenal part of the world
Which by its very flux demands that
Should
Necessitates
Can
Should must can
And thankfully at the time of our birth
The time of our utter forgetful helplessness
Some benevolent mammal took the responsibility
Meaning well as many are wont to do
To do what it took
To do what they should do
To keep us alive through the night
And we can shirk ungrateful and drive like a maniac
And display our power
Thereby displaying our relative impotence
On the public thoroughfare
And rage against the neglect of our uniqueness
And pester like mosquito without nourishing offspring
And somebody’s always faster
And somebody’s always louder
And somebody’s fury is always more merciless
Or we can acknowledge the fact
As we should acknowledge the fact
That others are trying to reach a destination
On the public thoroughfare
Though all should know it’s about the journey not the goal
That they too negotiate the challenging path winding and changeable
We have responsibilities to them as to ourselves
And the fragile skill of driving a car
Surely an unjust requirement in a civilized society
O friends let me take a train
Requires the utmost attention
And thus we have little attention to spare
For those fast and furious antics
The more blameworthy if you’re trying to win money
Can we please retire that tiresome word
But we have reasons to care for you
To esteem you
For you too can respond to reasons
And that’s a good thing
There is value in this responsiveness
However fragile and sporadic
You can do the right thing the good thing
Can
Though people often don’t
But they can if given the opportunity
To know the facts
And to understand the reasons that derive from facts
Thus we could all use a sensei
One devoted to being useful
One devoted to nourishing intellectual offspring
An expert with whom to confer
To devise exercises
To devise salutary routines
To devise a didactic poem
And we have reasons to sympathize
Even unto your very incapacity
O driver of the Dodge
Thou artful dodger
Admirable in thine artistry
Though not in thy will to defeat
To deprive of consent
For our urges our drives
Especially our drive for recognition
To be well seen and well heard and well liked
Submit but unwillingly
To our meager capacity for self control
And indeed how can we justly divide our self
Into the controlling and the controlled
When we may with more justice
Acknowledge the value of each person
Starting with ourselves
Respect the dignity of each person
Starting with ourselves
Esteem the surprising capacities of each person
Starting with ourselves
Whence thy fury O fast and furious
For fury is anger and anger a fight response
Welling up from our mammalian past
Curse of the males of the species
Though certainly females oft vent fury of their own
Often manifest male and female alike the urge to punish
That is to cause suffering as retribution for alleged misdeed
And such cause is never justified
But what misdeed have your neighbors done you
Save perhaps to withhold attention
When as a child you sorely needed it
And you lash out like tiger
And seek to induce fear
Misdeed most heinous
For no crime is worse than to cause a person
To fear for the integrity of their fragile permeable body
Deprive of consent by the inducement of fear
Dignity violated by the inducement of fear
Noisome noise while we try to give the baby to rest
Rascally child resistant to rest in their striving
And oft we carry out swaggering threat
Or mistake most melancholy
Cause pain and death by misadventure
In an arrogant instant of miscalculation
Primate absorption with appearance and reception
Can induce forgetful inattention
Can indeed prevent our ever knowing
The facts of the case
Especially the fact of our necessarily social situation
Our lovely interdependence
Here on the ground where we stand and fall
Facts which give us to understand that which we should do
Should
Let us wish that our furious driver might grow and learn
That is let us send good-vibe vectors in their direction
That they might achieve adulthood and learn a little patience
To situate the slings and arrows
That is the wounds we all incur especially as children
In the story of one’s own becoming
The care of others and care for others
Resolving our brittleness into resilience
We can help each other understand the facts
We can shed a little light
And we should help each other
We should care for one another
Love is not too strong a word nor high a bar
And as we love let us adopt humility
Easy enough for a being of immense capability and value
And concede our own ignorance
Even as we strive against it
And let us move with deliberation
Before judging the minds of others
Our actions expose the content of our character
And our words express to some extent our attitudes
Though some admittedly cultivate skill in deception
But let us not race to conclude
How another is or where they come from
We who know not ourselves
Let us not ignore the obscurity of our drives
Let us not ignore the demands often unconscious of will
Let us not ignore the attractiveness even of death
The rich desire to feel death’s cool embrace
Not only in the dark hour of the shadow
But in the firelight of youth’s temerity
The glamor of seeing how close you can come
With dull opiate or with the Dodge
Or the ascent to vertiginous height
As guzzling vodka while teetering on the rail
On the twentieth balcony at Daytona Beach
The ecstasy of body thrown asunder
Its perimeter dissipated utterly
The allure of the ultimate prohibition
And in certain frames of mind our own death
Seems not so much
But how dare we allow such passing
Through irresponsible challenge or culpable inattention
Even of the ephemeral intersection
How dare we subject the world to such loss
When somebody cares
Our little family cares
Our little universe cares