Years ago: 93-94
NYC: Columbia
trying to finish that thesis script
in Butler library
sitting at a wooden table in a room full of wooden tables
covered in a vast ceiling
creativity squeezed from my brain
my boyfriend waiting for me
only a notebook, a row of payphones on the first floor
a line forms as undergrads wait for the inter-college phone

Today, 2012
Berkeley: Doe library
Looks like Butler but nicely painted
not ravaged by the weather and city
rows of wooden desks with lamps and outlets
I write on my laptop, a cell phone in my bag
The row of payphones on the first floor are just empty booths

I feel like, I could look up, and you would be standing there
You, my boyfriend, who became my husband
My best friend, a difficult one who I stood by against the odds
You would be standing there, or maybe sitting down reading a
large novel in French, and we would get up and leave together for a dinner on Broadway

I look up.  The room is quiet and clear.
The air is fresh, no sounds of the inner city
You are not there
You live only in my mind
I wonder, how it was for you, years ago, in your year here at Berkeley
before you ran home, uncomfortable on this strange coast, this new world

I wish I could say to you
doe library looks like butler library
isn't that interesting
when I'm here, I feel like I'm there
But you, my past persecutor and abuser, would not listen
you new wife would be horrified.
It's such a simple thought
I don't want anything more
I'm afraid of you
Just wish I could connect, with that good part
at an innocent time when things were working

red pen in hand....
i critique people's thoughts
and dreams

six years at university,
to become a god....
who moulds minds
and delivers future prophecies, ready for unwrapping.

who creates bell curves,
of fail to high distinctions.

that the undergrads,
follow like dancing, pavlovian dogs...

the posts...have slipped
the leash and ...
leave thoughtful piles of...extruded work, in the academic yard.

six years at uni...as a dog
nine years at uni ...as a god.

it is amazing,
how the garnering
of parchments
and strange hats,
can transpose a person's world.

I'd make a fine stone in
the Duck and Drake game - 
skimming through the surface
with the bare necessary contact,
to sink when slowed down;

you had seen me slowing down
and sink with a faint splash,
the moment you said it was better
that we meet in letters,
best we do not meet at all;
or did I say that - 
I do not remember;
perhaps yes, for you never
said a word which could reconcile 
me with my self which I left that evening
on the shores of the big city 
and hurried back, leaving you
to go round and around - 
the cab guy picking customers and dropping -
nobody ever finding their true destination
but only places to go.

Ever since I have housed myself in
the crowded cafes where
people smoke cheap/semi-expensive cigarettes
and sip on tea/coffee/lime-tea/black -tea/ginger-lime-tea
and talk- 
the talking never ends and it is an all right feeling sitting
in the bright light, knowing that people have things to say when
I can vaguely recollect my thoughts.
If I was a Jean-Paul Sartre, I would avoid pondering over your thoughts
like the beer mug in front of his eyes at which he would avoid looking for
half an hour straight,
but I am not a French existentialist philosopher
and reading four and a half dead poets a day,
plunging myself into nicotine only tires me enough
to fall asleep,
and this is when you enter my dreams.

Your arrival is agreeable to me and I always
find myself sitting confused in one of those galleries
which my mind constructs -
a glittering set for the presence of 
the two of us -
faces of other people in my dreams,
I do not recall.

We kiss and I am almost convinced that it is real - 
there is no room to feel otherwise;
much like the first time when I kissed you
and you moaned a little, quivered a bit;
here we have it all going - our tongues slithering our soul -
teeth biting our nerves - this is how a kiss should be;
if there was a thing called a 'perfect kiss',
then our kissing portrait would make rounds of 
the internet under the Creative Commons license -
a picture which young undergrads would use 
in their assignment -
perhaps frame it on the wall
and when the grades come out, they would
get wasted with their pocket money in one of the
many sun-lit bars where the music is loud and
kisses are stolen behind the closed doors of
the public washroom.
You leave me in my dreams for a moment or two
and I get restless again, taking fast, counted steps to find you
and you arrive again -
such a relief it is to see you, and know 
that it is a relief for you to see me too;

to life I wake up, knowing that you are far away and
that I could still be with you in less than three hours from now,
but if I should - I do not know.
I step outside and aggressively look for a cigarette -
a certain tangible object so willing to burn for me
and wrap myself in a jacket like I once
wrapped you in my arms.
Your warmth was more than 
my jacket bought at a fifty-percent
discount could provide,
I thought you felt the same
but perhaps
I was not of your size
or you did not like winter
anyway.

Everything "adult" was new
And I knew what I wanted to do
All undergrads are really the same
We want to get naked with someone, go insane

For those of us on lockdown in our families
This was our first chance, to get some, finally

I remember the discovery of the feel of a fully naked man
His muscles were so hard, he was so hairy I didn't understand
How I hadn't noticed all these things before
What can you know through clothes?  You need more.

And I went through all the dramas
And I can remember all their names I promise
I saw, I experienced the beginnings, middles and ends
And I had my ups and downs, it just depends

And now it's not that I'm bored with it all
It's just I think I know how much it hurts when you fall
Everything seems to matter so much more
I'm not just a kid, living mostly on my parent's money in a dorm.

Born right, if this incongruous line is to be believed
****, from everything I've seen, why won't you let me be?
From the way they make it sound, I think i'll just pass up that pension

With this luck I'm not sure why I don't pass tests just guessing

If its multiple choice at least
(and it always is)
You can tell I'm more than fed up with the lack of agency
Developing around our common enemies
Festering, on the bloated *** of this so called society
Becoming a myiasis

And I'll never hear the end of it
From the kids to ugly to earn the extra credit
And from the back half of my grey matter
Turning numb from mindless chatter

But

Society will silently suffer
Burdened down with crowns churning from an endless gutter
Plastic trash meshing poorly, piling into a funeral pyre
Ever burning and choking out the fat-*** cooperate liars

No wonder gas mask production is up
As I'm getting ready to upchuck my lunch
Sorry for getting stuck, or regressive
But batter up, ****, get ready for restoration

Claiming good as bad
With every passing fad
Distracting all my would be comrades
Zombify the undergrads

I don't have time for mindless upheaval
And replacement

Classes started up again today. Soon, we’ll be gloriously stressed, and clocked-up on whatever. Our hearts will swell to the pre-med symphony - a frantic opus, composed in the key of no sleep.

In seminars for rising pre-med seniors, (What's needed to get that med-school slot!), it’s obvious that 60% of the students who started out with us, on this track, are gone - left for other majors.
“I wasn’t happy, it was too much,” they said.

I feel a pang when I hear that undergrads we’ve shared a trench with have switched their major to basket weaving (political science), TikTok (computer science) or Phys-Ed.

I envy those deserters, I pity those deserters, I envy.. Wait, aren’t deserters supposed to be, well, you know.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, the stubborn few, cling to the dream. It’s a waking dream, for caffeinated zombies, obsessive-compulsive workaholics and maladjusted wonks who neglect personal needs, relationships and in some cases personal hygiene (not me, of course) in favor of a goal.

Maybe there’s something wrong with us?

Lasix vision surgery required.
Basic vision has expired
Matrix of equations
X and y seem to tangle
Key chains in the dryer
Key tags lie
im high and wired.


Impaired in basic judgement
Get in hate laced huff and puff n
And do my velcro shoes up
Like its nothing
I take *** Ed in my co ed class
undergrads age 30 something
Ferris Buehler runs this
Subject.
Much as trump craves the second coming

Damnation is a major slave ship
Thats a statement for discussion
Foreshadow is a scrumptious
Dish but I've literally
Touched nothing of the luncheon


Joe just being silly. Stuffing muffins in her lunch kit.
Punchlines on rocky sun shine
Hope the blind guy
Sees my rhymes or something
Curb appeal the healing
Hand of a munchkin
Drunk in love and
Bag of grass and little weeds
Is the only thing
I'm touching
Actually **** all drugs
I'm done with all the dumb ****.
Cut the tape.
These muffins are disgusting
And I ate the whole buffet
Munching. Gotta stop the drugging.