Rene Descartes Earring

At a flea market. a a table
where a fat man was selling
bootleg tapes of the Hot 100
of the moment,
I purchased the malleus,
one of the bones of the inner ear,
that had once belonged to
Rene Descartes.

I took it home, varnished it,
drilled a hole in it,
hung it on a gold wire,
then stuck it in my own left ear,
where it shone
like a profane ruby
in the sun.

Whenever I’m driving,
it knocks against my head
in time with the radio:
"Lolli, Lolli, pop that body,"
and the like.

Sometimes it drowns out
my own ear’s efforts
to translate the world around me,
claiming that the music
doesn’t match the message
it’s always preached, and that
I’m missing the point:

"I think, therefore I am," it bangs
again and again, a prisoner hoping
to make contact with a fellow inmate.
"This isn’t thinking.  All this body stuff.
All this noise about what doesn’t think at all.

Sacre bleu, and zut alors!"  I just nod my head
and smile, bob along to the tunes.
Not everything needs forethought.  Not everything
bothers to carry meaning with it.  "Low Low Low Low
Low Low Low."  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I think, most of the time, and so I am,
most of the time.  Sometimes, though,
I haven’t got a thoughtful bone in my body
and I want to turn it off, that knocking
at my ear that tells me that four hundred years
of the demands of rational thought ought to be enough
for me.  Sometimes, body and beat matter more,
and I refuse to believe that because I’m not thinking,
I’ve ceased to exist.