The room feels heavy,
sleepy morning smiles
and satiate English words
clinging to to air.
They reach out,
trying to pinch me,
as insistent as
the professor's smile.

Some of us still feel
as we do at 7 a.m.,
though our minds are
overflowing fountains
of new knowledge
as we try to hold
and scoop it back in.
they're drowning me,
the letters are drowning
and too tired
to swim.

It's the feeling I get
of a stomach ache
and not being able to tell
whether it's because
I'm actually sick,
or just overwhelmed
with possibilities.
*What will I do?
What will I be?
Maybe I should
just try to focus
on what's in front
of me.

The day they told me you had resigned,
I went searching for you.
My eyes sharpened to find you
like two new Ticonderoga pencils
on this timed, standardized test of life.
I, your pupil,
felt desperate to fill in the bubbles
on this journey
to fill up my heart again
with answers to questions
I knew only you could
score & tell me were right.
But you never had exams in your courses
I should've known when you left,
that was your way,
your blessing
to write my dissertation
and live my philosophy out, for you,
You had given me love,
you had always seen what I couldn't;
my potential. Who I am, truly.
And that's why, from you,
I learned everything & could feel internal peace
for I learned my purpose
& in my search for you again,
great teacher,
I realized you had never left
and the test had never existed.
I will still always wonder though
where you went.

(c) 2014

I told the professor I loved beat literature and all the hippy consequences. He said they were such a small part of the population (along with Native Americans too apparently,  he noted a different time. Because of what, you *******? I thought).

A pompous misguided thing, which either understandably or surprisingly, been teaching there since the 1960s. Five minutes of a winded attempt at putting anglophile humor into the lecture and you know the choice is "understandably" rather than "surprisingly." Been professing for the establishment, closed to other ways of thinking trickery.  

A real square through and through. As if all change should come from appeasing the tyrannical bleachy supposed majority. Those in poverty, darker skins, gays, drug users, and all around flashy dressers ought to don suits for their one night Ed Sullivan performance. Get the folks on Bass Run Lane to be okay with seeing you in a glass cage in their living room scene. For just a couple decades. Then maybe they'll be used to seeing you in a grocery store. You'll always be laughable though, as they designed it to be so.

The hippies were a very small majority says the anointed professor.
"So were the suffragettes" snaps back a fiery thing sitting next to me. I should have talked to her more.