IV. Disclaimer

At this point, you should tell me
about the legendary tumor
stuck like a wad

of gray gum in your brain.
Your urgency should crisp this page       
to a Roman scroll,

one pardoning Lucretius
for abstract bestiality, or one
revoking Ovid's exile.

You are free to include
diagrams, advertisements, a hint
of sepia for baroque type

selling tonics, or therapeutic
electricity from wax-mustached men
in Sweden. Orgasms, like tracts,

should be free, and I would
understand if you had to
leave now, or change

the next scene to Zacariah's colloquy
with the leper tribe of Uqbar,
who were exceedingly wroth.

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"Disclaimer" is a section from a long poem, "Key Oblique," which I wrote in grad school specifically because I was fed up with people talking about their "aesthetics" as if they were mutually exclusive, fortified compounds that one never ventured out of. Cranial hermitages don't look good on anybody.