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Humanisticism

By Allison Campbell
Poetry•Vol. XXV No. 2 (Summer 2012)

This is a disorder where you walk around identifying everything as human until otherwise designated.

The shrub is a toddler, the cypress a regal, slender man who fancies himself a catch, though he snobs all the ladies to such an extent he’s never provided opportunity to test the theory. No, again, it is just a cypress.

The bum, all layered-up and hunched over, with legs splayed on the corner is really just a box of clothes whose contents leak out unto the November pavement.

Wrinkles in the shower curtain can only be the outline of ghosts, dirty ones.

If one responds to first impressions, it’s exhausting. Everything constantly looks like something else, and even things you take as human, that are human, can sometimes turn out not to be the type of human you thought. The girl, yards away, looks to be your sister. Feet away, she becomes someone who is not your sister.

The person suffering from humanisticism frequently surrenders to conflicting pangs of disappointment and shame.

It’s looking too hard at exactly what you are [see YOU].

It’s finding what you are too easily represented in what you are not [see BODY].

It’s deciding against not only objectivism but objectivism’s existence [see PERCEPTION].

You must be convinced that god, spelled with a lower case g, is within rather than above, that we are the way we are supposed to be, original sin is a hoax, and finding fish that look human is less scientific discovery than it is common sense [see entry on ANIMALS].

Allison Campbell
Allison Campbell’s work has most recently appeared in Court Green, big bell, the Pinch, Labletter and Rattle. She currently collaborates on the comic-blog D.Diderot

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