...or a Nobel, or...your imagination fails you.  There is no mortal honor to match the words winging from your mouth.

The poem that you read cycles a set of pristine and immortal images through eighteen different languages and twelve different meters, each new chorus waxing to a further aching fullness.  The work is a history of the world, a biography of the historical Christ, the tragic story of a doomed relationship, and a treatise on the more controversial aspects of modern cosmology. It is the best thing ever made by anyone, anywhere, in human history.

The Poem touches on bicycles but briefly, and then only elliptically, as "doubled wheels, engines of freedom."  The line evokes a standing ovation from the audience, as does every other stanza.  Several parts elicit jumping or dancing ovations.

Finally, you reach the vers libre conclusion some eight or twelve hours after you began.  Daylight is angling in at the bottom edges of the theatre doors, but no one notices; their eyes belong to you.

"Beatrix Mundi!/ Mariana!/ Queen of the Sea!" you whisper hoarsely, each line invoking a previous movement in the work in the most emotionally crushing fashion.  Someone in the audience begins sobbing, but he chokes himself to silence, not willing to mar a single word of the Poem with tears.  "A Child yet waits on you./ In the dark, he sits, he listens./ My love, I strain still." 

The applause lasts an additional three hours, during which twenty engagements are announced and four weddings are performed.  The MC asks if he can bear your child.  Gina doesn't say anything at all; she just gazes at you in adoration.

Now, all of this would be infinitely satisfying...if you were the actual author of the Poem.  As it happens...

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