Asylum

In the majestic asylums of the future, of carved stone, of glass, three stories high, sometimes more than that, oh loin-clothed ancestor, your descendants, if I may so flatter us, gather in something like, you might say, tribes, busied at what you might call a rain dance, anyway fancy devotions bringing forth over the years such marvels as, oh astonished future child, to jump ahead, what you might call machine brains routinely dispatch in seconds, although of course we inmates were also, in spare moments, individuals, the originality of whose otherwise unsuspected dark and teeming inner life might at any moment produce a fame such as I, for one, have resoundingly achieved, or how could I look you in the worshipful face, oh future child, or you in the smugly serene, heavy-browed face, oh ancestor, faces unmarked by the exercise of turning yourselves, day by day, into a slow, spongy version of future machines, and the asylum smile of one pretending to like it, and how could I look with any compassion at your unpretending machine face, oh near-future brainy machine, who will take on the devotions, freeing us to our neglected humors and biles or whatever it is that could possibly occupy us out there, so soon, beyond the glass, in the teeming woods, the dark.