The Sunday Poem: The City the Genius Built

You could walk forever
                              and never run out of streets
tripleproofed and wired
               with maps on every corner

The police carried ray guns
                              and there was a rocket launch
before breakfast once a week —
               anyone was welcome to watch

The genius himself presided
                              from inside his marvelous house
glass panels
               translucent paper walls

Passersby wrote on the walls
                              tales of the genius
and the genius read them backwards
               from inside and they were great

The streets were paved with
                              something ordinary and dark
and it didn’t matter
               nobody looked down

And nobody
                              least of all the genius
thought to look up

Yes, another one of those “genius poems.” Standard disclaimers apply: they’re not about me (well, not entirely).

Earlier posted poems in the series:

• The Genius at Age 6
• How to Be a Genius
• The Imaginary Playmate Speaks

It was with this poem that the Genius character took on some life of his own, becoming a strange imaginary person that you could talk to but who was just like us, and who lived in a world very different from our own but exactly the same.

This poem is, I suppose, about the way that isolation (not even literal isolation) can make you see things differently, can make you not see the obvious, can lead you to misunderstand the entire way in which the world relates to you (what’s a good message backwards?). Everyone has their own city built around them, with maps that only a few others know. We’re good at showing off the tourist spots to other people, but not the alleyways.

I wanted to give a sense of impending doom, I suppose, to one’s illusions.

Looks like the last revision on this was around October of 1994…