course of study

how perfect for you,
photography

teaching you chemicals
, you - the acolyte, shut in
darkness, finding the lost alchemist arts,
the development of an image, captured
- literally, stealing the soul
of whatever your f-stop's darting eye
winked at, as the light bounced off with it

images
inform the mind, by feeding on souls
cloned and grown from light

That's sci-fi mephistopheles stuff right there
photography?

or rather, it used to be. It is,
of course
maybe all digital, now.
That might even be apropos

Study is, after all, supposed
to prepare you for life,

not nostalgia.
Unless one studies
deliberately to be

a historian, an archivist, haunting
hallways of evidence, an anthropologist
amongst other things:
studying primitive attitudes
that others can only

pretend to live