M. A. ISTVAN JR. - POEMS

M. A. Istvan Jr., despite a down-to-earth deportment that covers well both his advanced education and artistic output, finds it a struggle not to isolate due to how his Asperger’s syndrome manifests itself: stumbling verbosity, extreme attention to detail, and hypersensitivity, mainly. Such symptoms, coupled with his underclass roots (which cannot help but radiate an unwelcome odor in higher society), have understandably led to discrimination (especially in academic settings where, now, the chief duty of a professor is never to make anyone uncomfortable).

Broken Therapy
​

​The broken have
little choice
and the strong could gain
from the meeting
of insights,
 
but the fragile
ought to proceed
with caution: therapists,
vain and with axes
to grind,
 
have priestly authority
to torment
those who resist--
until, broken,
they need therapy.
 

Unmarked
​

 
That philosophic concepts
were created (many
by Aristotle) should
caution us against
rejecting concepts
 
just for being
new, but still
we should be (as were
Aristotle’s peers)
skeptical
 
of new concepts--
skeptical
as to whether
they mark out
the not-yet marked.
 
 
 
 

​Monocrop Milieu
 

​That the hypersexual form
of black female musician
monopolizes
over other forms, and that
the problem-solving state
of consciousness
 
monopolizes
over other states,
is—while as unfortunate
as if Hermes were
the only god—not a call
for extermination.
 
 

​The Best Scream
 

​The dejected man
you eye
as a pleading prayer
to incite him
to scream out against
what has brought him
to this. And yet
 
for the task he is
too dejected. And yet
his silence,
which you cannot shake
from memory,
was perhaps
the best scream.
 
 

Feigning Density 
​

​An effective manipulator
lays out points
in such a way that
the conclusion to be drawn
is obvious and yet
is what he depicts himself
 
as too dull
to draw himself,
which leaves his audience
to do so with such potency
that they easily assume
it was theirs all along.