Another Link in the Chain

Our starched moral rectors play dismay well,

Their mouths open, aghast at the bloody mess

Made of what they try so hard to sanitize.

First, the teens are taught to be meat puppets.

Then, we throw twenty-five of them,

An unmatched set, into a big, sweltering melting pot.

Finally, we tell them to grind it out for a year.

Didn't anyone know this is the recipe for sausage?

Watson

Donne had his sonnets;

T.S. had his tomes.

Holmes had his mysteries,

and Watson had his Holmes.

Jacques Cousteau, he had his diving suit;

Chuck Yeager had his wings.

What we search for is the same;

It's strange we'd all find different things.

Parallel

I see time's new face, linear but parallel,
His time and her time and my time and your time,
But then they connect, loop together,
Wind around as on a cribbage board,
Having grown a beginning and an end.
Finally, time introduces itself
As a doorway through a doorway
Through a doorway, to the limits of sight,
A face for nothing but more of yesterday.
and I have no ideas but sleep.

To the World

I've seen scars raised by landmass-boxing.

I've sped down them, too–on skis.

I've seen a real-life Mordor

By the bluest of the seas.

I've seen pie-sized green eyes

Framed by rare red hair in curls,

and speaking in mathematical terms,

I've not even been to the world,

Nor know I my entire mind,

Although I know I wanna.

I've been as far as shelf's edge,

Not to deepest Mariana.

There are seven billion minds like mine,

Worlds of lightning and ridges and rifts.

In philosophical terms, no one's ever been bored,

Just too lazy to google-drift.

To Belong or Not to Belong

I belong here.
I can produce the paper to prove it.
I can produce paper like a preposterously paranoid printer,
Hyperaware of its own impending obsolescence.
I have always been able to.  That's why I belong here.
That's why I am here.

I do not belong here.
I can present the posture to prove it.
I have no equipment.  I have no experience.  I have no authority.
I don't even have a role.  I don't even have a seat.
I don't even know why I'm here.

Study Hall

I sit in an uncomfortable silence, watched but unsupervised.
The unwelcome symphony of my every movement
Stiffens my worn, arthritic ears.  I yearn to stretch them.

I sit in a painful silence, supervising a room full of trained humans
Who have been told that their thoughts are irrelevant,
That the expression thereof is unwelcome.

The silence can make a silence uncomfortable.
Only the explanation can make a silence painful.

Intrusion will make that silence unbearable.

The Battle Hymn of the Unadaptable English Teacher

A day may come when the traditional curriculum fails,
When we assign contemporary texts
and let students choose their assessments,
But it is not this day.

An hour of rigor and relevance,
When the cultural canon comes crashing down,
But it is not this day.

This day we write!

By all that you hold dear, I bid you,
Sit down in rows.