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Judy Gahagan

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Today Our Main Concern...

Today I would have talked about amygdala,
almond-shaped clusters of inter-connected structures
perched above the brain stem -

but today was ominous:
inner and outer weather mingled around the campus
in a tide of cobalt clouds.

Amygdala, little almond,
I would have told them it was you who runs these loops
of low-grade melodrama -

but a gull was crying
above the concrete temple of the Arts Block
as if it had forgotten the sea.

I would have taken them through the limbic system
and the ancestral environments of our feelings,
explained the neural hi-jackings

but feared I might be mad myself,
sing turmoil at them,
sing the syrupy vernacular of the heart

and they’d be waiting
faceless, rising tier on tier like placid saints,
the dispassionate white screen waiting

to be scrawled with the graffiti of frets and angst,
the p.a. system sense the drowning hollows
of my voice and boom uncertainty.

Today our main concern... our main concern will be
the cohorts of our intimate enemies,
the toxic thoughts, the case of love...

 

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