Lower Higher Ed

           Here God
gums up in the mouth,
won’t spit itself out
with every easy expletive,
leaving the discussion free
for disagreement.

           Harder
to digest than politically correct
sex, shit, or Shades of Grey,
it then tries to slide
down the coarse slope
of the throat,
but won’t.

           Or rather
can’t, catching instead
on the inside of each
tongue-in-cheek,
a wedge of weighty
popular propositions.

           Show-stopper,
thought-lasher, can’t-believe-you-
believe quasher, eyes as wide as
some size ten foot in a mouth
trying to chew through
the ultimate classroom

           taboo
while you wonder why
the syllable turns
rancid, Whoever shall
deny me fanatically churning
bile in a belly of half-
digested

           Truth.

Dear Reader,

Can I be direct with you?

War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.

First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.

But we can’t do it without readers like you.

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