Simple
(adj.) guileless, innocent; honest,
open, sincere; characterized by a lack
of knowledge or education; not having
or showing a high level of mental acuity;
intellectually unsophisticated.
i.
What everybody wants these days:
a little ease and understanding,
a guy speaking good words:
simply amazing solutions
for our fears, our yearning.
A balm that builds a Chinese
wall around our hearts,
our minds of rammed earth,
of 400,000 lives beginning
at the First Pass Under Heaven
ending at the Old Dragon’s
Head in the Sea,
and despite what they say,
Wikipedia confirms
you can’t see it from the moon
based on the optics
of resolving power.
Yet, it stands like a fact
stretched 10,000
miles in our imagination,
a monument out of this world
ii.
(n.) Uncompounded or unmixed thing;
a substance free from foreign elements,
a medicine or the search for a cure. Archaic;
(v.) To gather simples, medicinal herbs or plants. Archaic.
Tricksome when used as noun
or verb, not at all that simple.
Gather the cure while ye may
for whatever disorder we imagine:
fear’s wilding tendrils, the ornamental
multiple, the elaborate intellectual.
Find the tonic towards the simple-toothed,
simple-minded and simple-lettered.
This pile and juke of meanings through
the years, what we used to call waffling.