They peer back at the palimpsest,
This erstwhile dipso band.
They’re feeling better, glancing down
At what’s once wrought by hand.

Faded, dread reddishness of the eye;
Back they are getting down
To business with relentlessness,
All smiles, and not a frown.

The scope, the scope, the microscope
Can scope what they can’t see
With the naked eye: what was scribed on
The vellum’s history.

Women and men, so dutiful,
Now sober, deeply mine
Traces of ground-down once-written things
They’ll find in the scraped lines.

The parchment is old but rot-free;
Allayed has been decay
Of material, but mere specs
Remain in modern days.

The fiber, hefty, though scraped away
The words to not much more than dust.
But great discoveries are made
By those who will ass-bust.

Their open lids are on the scope.
Then one calls, “I sense some heat
In faint traces that are harkening to my eye!”
It is synesthesia that he does apply
In terms chosen to bleat.

“I’m reading about sweaty limbs:
Some are twined, some in splay.
It looks like a ménage to me.
For now that’s all I’ll say.”

More words come into focus well;
Spirits are lifted high
As was a gargantuan gland
Rising up to the sky.
And, as per your perspective, things get worse.
But no one here is shy.

Some nubile moves are more than implied
In what the scope has spied.
Softened tissue is brought up
And ready for a ride.

Defrocked and rocked by sultry swain
’twixt gams unenjambed, spread.
Beneath a huge “man” grove she lay;
In an arbor they had their play.
More was eagerly read.

The palimpsester make a quip:
About a python snake
That can bring on earthly delight
And rears its head four times a night.
Its owner is a rake.

His next metaphor would be “whip,”
Concerning the desire
Expressed in the text that he’s cracked.
But on the gags he has backtracked,
And his mind’s out of the mire.

He finds passages about tongues,
How they are used with flair.
A spring of love they make depart,
Imposing tender care.
The text went on quite explicitly.
This was pornographic fare!

Some sweat is “foamented” that day,
But scientifically
Is how he views what some call “rank”…
He has a Ph.D.!!