He’s the one who has half-hour-long conversations
About books he’s never read and likely never will
Because he’s so damn busy all the time.
He’s the one who uses “intrinsic” in a sentence
Even though he’s not quite sure what it means
And the subject is quite far removed from philosophy.
He’s the one who has a solution to all the problems in the world
Except his own.
And yes, he does have them
A lot of them
And he knows it, too.
He reminds himself daily
Of his failures and follies
Of his post-modern panic attacks and debilitating doubt
The more cynical, the better.
Not pessimistic, but realistic, he says.
Sometimes he blames it all on society
Which he knows is wrong
But he does it anyway.
Sometimes he blames it all on God
Which he knows is wrong
But he does it anyway.
Sometimes he says it’s because he’s human
And that much is true…
But where does it get him?
Where do his notions and questions and dead white man quotations lead him?
His big ideas are big only inside his mind
So what value do they have if he keeps them there?
At what point do his ideas turn to actions
And his actions to consequences
And those consequences to new situations, so new ideas
New intellectual frontiers
A cycle of inspiration
A necessary cycle…
But for him, the cycle is stuck.
The wheels stopped turning years ago
The gears have rusted
And all he can do is crank out the same old existentialism, over and over.
And guess what, he knows it
But he’s never bothered to fix it.
Because he likes the way this chaos feels
The way his infant thoughts feel
As they're forming in his brain, squirming and jostling
The way his thesaurus words feel
As they roll off his tongue and drip onto the empty page
A kind of intellectual masturbation.
And he really likes that term–
“Intellectual masturbation”
He has to repeat it to himself because of how brilliant it is.
So he’ll go and write a poem about it
(Free verse, of course)
A poem about people who think they can think their problems away
A poem about people who do too much thinking, and not enough learning
Because they think they already know
A poem about pseudo-intellectuals.
He likes using that word, too
Because it suggests that he isn’t one.