On Beauty
--Troy Jollimore

Beauty some have ventured is proportional:
the right relative ratio of the actual

against the actual. Others hypothesize
that beauty’s roots lie buried in the sexual,

insisting that aesthetics are relational:
the eye of the beholder is the noumenal

perceiving core, where spores of the phenomenal
sprout into lit-screen images. The visual

is permeated, down to the foundational,
with lust, with longing. Say it: we are animals,

which does note mean that we must all be criminals,
but only that desire is constitutional,

that we are fixed to perpetrate the species--
I meant perpetuate-- as if our duty

were  coupled with our terror. As if beauty
itself were but a syllabus of errors.