Kant

The quaintness of tautologies
tickles my eyelids,
pixie dust sprinkles over my head,
and my neck slumps unlike the Thinker.
Purple balloons await outside this classroom.
I know this because Kant is boring.

The shape of the smell of my mother.
The taste of the words of my brother.
My father smiling again.
Impossibilities haunt my dreams.

The professor has given up, my own attention
a current redirecting to the moss-covered forest–
the Cape of Good Hope lonely without my company,
Africa is an actual place
there is no mystery,
the etchings of existence on those trees
scratched by animals conceived by other animals.
these are real things we are talking about.