Ab+ante

PART I

ANTIPATHY

 

Far away and living in the future where the smell of books was still sacred
Professor Laura White more out of breath and restless than hopeful
put forward her plans for the empathy virus
Hers
Not the old future of concrete and cable cars
A new stage in human evolution
Eradicate that neverrrrending tendency to fight in just 100 lines
Taped upon some faculty lecturn in anticipatory seduction
Not chimpanzees but bonobos
Dappled shade – lights-camera-evolution
Meteoropolis
Illuminated as some pages were found by chance to be
By her students and some peers-as-critic:
Encore!
Praise!
Her final word reverberates around the auditorium and functions
As it should.
Fragmented thoughts of future flavours
Behavioural studies of those primates proved too weird
And she had disappeared into statistics
Analysis
For a couple of years
And returned with plasticity, parables, notepads.

PART II

EGO

The future:
Never cemented
Exasperated with the failures she had not embraced
The empathy virus was created to erase

Retroactively it appears
The world begs/begins to breathe
Always already it had happened
Had it?

Ergo.

PART III

LOVE

An air of Bliss
Reward and relief
And you’re not sure what the award was for but you know that you won

And back 20 years she was 19
Imagining her first day in the lab.