The Fall
Ah! To give myself
to fresh young faces, all
turned on to handsome me who’s born to
teach
effortlessly.
I think: she’s here, the Muse, we’re close, my speech
is fancy free.
The epithet “professor” hardly fits
when you’re so loose;
equations, symbols even flow, like bits
of Mother Goose.
Let uptight baldheads stumble over text
to yawning hall,
to empty seats, to puzzled and
perplexed,
and start a bra…
but what?
You say I’m in the same field as he who
goes from class to lab to work on
“quasi-phrastic
blufreds in the effect
of zeta rays on lugrium
excited states,”
and works on weapons systems twice a
month?
But I thought the world was made of atoms
with academic freedom!
It does not change with one cut out.
You say I think too much?
Just follow the mob at faculty meetings
and don’t worry?
No, no, no, say I: human kind
has borne much reality, and will
still more;
I will not look away.
The world’s connected; now I understand
why the day I let them vote
on whether homework counts for
grades,
they looked at me: you weird or
something?
Alienation is comfort
to fifteen-credit dexedrine employment seekers.
They stand in line at semester’s end
to have their foreheads stamped:
“prime” and “choice,” or “oversize,”
“irregular.”
(Whose table does he grace
that asked if “X” meant any mass or
some specific one?
Who takes her off the rack
that popped gum bubbles as I
answered?)
In
I ply my wares like blufred
baldhead.
Oh god, Confucius, Einstein, Buddha, Freud; I bleed!
(early to
mid 1980s)
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