Plato Stung
Jacob Friedman

Jacob Friedman, a student at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, just completed his independent study of allegory – a “name for something that never could be named” other than “inconceivable idea,” existing “in the difficulty of what it is to be.” He is also in a race with a close friend to see who could get more poems accepted for publication before literature becomes as numbing as television.  He’s in the lead.  But the turtle beat the hare.

Plato Stung

A bee lunged out
             once feeling
                          the hive was threatened.

Pheromones communicated:
                                                    turn on
                                                    defensive instincts!
Black and yellow,
             zigzagging
through the air,
             moving nothing like the line
that follows its name.
                                                             The target appears:
                               gaping entrance,                                        thick fleshy gates.

                                     Lands on
                                     The lower one,
                                     Rests its wings, assesses.

No danger;
A false alarm?

                                                  But drawing one’s stinger is oh so tempting.
                                                  As a fatal pen it signed itself: Quick death.


Like the bee’s population
so is the value of my tutor’s mind.
                                                                              Those gates, you see, belong to him.
                                                                              Though his wisdom, unrivalled, owes nothing
                                                                              to an insect.
I should know.
I am with him all the time. And though
I rarely get the chance to return his ideas,
I watch him exchange with others.

                        He can make any man question himself.
                        He can shake foundations, turning heart-felt ideals into contestable opinions.
                        But when he wrote down his first word ; he censored himself.

Pens know the minds he touched, but forget the bodies he groped.
And a slew of bees still clog the drains in the public baths of Athens.

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