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Shall all my thoughts thought Actions done Be channelled into the University syllabus Learn tricks prescribed by examiners Only when Society deigns To offer courses of study? Constricted by contortions of Convulsions of Squirming in the irony grips of Despairing to escape The putrid dank slimy coils Of gross immense snake That towers above my quaking self And smiles And flickers his tongue. Sinking desperate even deeper down In mirey mud - swamp - clinging tearing Sucking with hideous slow blurp-gurgle-blurp At my vainly struggling, feebly fighting head, Where any compromise weak-hearted temptation means dropping jolting one-way slip Into muddy oblivion. Why must my sluggish moving rivers Tepid eddying rivers Run yes-sir no-sir willingly-obedient Down demarcated indicated Bedded grooves of well-worn rocks Just to melt my individuality In amorphous mingled abstract seas Of Nonentity? While mind potential latent lurks Cross vistas vast of broad expanse Of silent deep unknown unmoving Store of dynamite. I wish to breach the concrete slabs To let the springs of thought flow free Plummet spinning, whirl cascading Down stunning falls Down rapid-moving-jumping-swimming Gushing Streams of elevated substance pure, To range at will, unleashed, and soar And flower the desert waste's despair But I can't escape from penetrate from Cannot scale or fly away from Bore my scratching yearning way through Walls of concrete prison dam Or so it seems And outside the deserts are still dry And crops are dying.---(Peter Elliott) - - Return to "The Circus" Index Page