Imagine the dartboard

Without any bullseye

Such that each darter

Assigns highest score

To whichever sector

Catches his dart

Here is teleology

Of end-justifies-means

Consequentialism

Passing as morality

In the supple imposture

Of ethics by minds

Unwilling to accept

Any codified judgment

Of utterly right

Or utterly wrong

Which is to say minds

With no ethics at all

the old Jacobin
shook the foundations
eighteen centuries in their accretion
they collapsed under force
of his pounding critique
of accepted pure reason

then he rebuilt them strong
where they still stand erect
on progenitive, perceptive
practical reason
autonomous
in yield of morality

he achieved revolution
some measured Copernican
fixing man’s mind
as the sun-centered point
for ineluctable orbit
of ethical knowledge

he fused metaphysics
with morals in his blunt
categorical imperative
for judging motivation
and gauging the truth
of virtue in action

as champion of civil liberties
he ushered embrace of
constitutional means
to self-ruling republics
by the then-breaking wave
of enlightenment

he still shores schools of ethics,
metaphysics, theology,
logic, epistemology,
even his critics are forced
to describe what’s non-Kantian
about their own precepts

I confess being smitten
with this sociable prodigy
loved by his students
respected by colleagues
his legacy…