LICENSES

Every license
lies in laceration

in disheveled files
of every bureaucrat

all the way from Berlin's
Stasi to Russia's Gulag

in eight mornings
by men as wolves

gnawing on crusts
of brown bread

in a squalor of darkness
hatred and graft

the price of body parts
haggles in the market place

tearing us apart
in suspicious hallucination

reading in the college library
the first of revelation's aroma

with a new dilemma's reality
deep in salient shadows

of deconstruction theory
with every diploma

ending at graduation
taking away any attraction

of a printed privilege
at theology's replacement

for he has sent out his word
in the world, not of it

with all knowledge and drama
for a poet's revealing.