We are all Victor Frankensteins,
constructing and mending our monsters
with maps and mirrors

to adhere to programmatic intracourse—
pretense to an imminent eminence—

drafting each life an iteration—
not a splinter of a Platonic ideal,
but a trending—bottom-up, not top-down.

In standing on the shoulders of giants,
we gambol upon high bone ledges
and, looking upward, perhaps leaping,
forget the rickety skeletal scaffold below,

the sacrifice of Socrates
and other ornamental hermits,
the intrusion of light,
of cataclysmic catalysts,
into the circus of circuits.