Giving, maybe.

Maybe forgiving.

Neither cheating teachers

nor teaching cheaters,

and not much else, according to good authorities.

Authorities on goodness.

 

Letting other people’s poetry wreck me.

Like last night at the reading.

Like today in a book

in a coffee shop

half-drowned in rain.

 

Loving my wife and everyone else

who lets me in. Even you,

who tried to ruin me.

Who tried to destroy me.

I can’t help thinking of you fondly.

 

People like us don’t belong in the “real world”

or in the Godforsaking simulacrum of it

that Academia has become, but out of spite

I drag my broken-down body and soul

through the burning sands of both.

Maybe I’m good at forgiving.

I want to be good at giving.

 

Listening to music until I think

the notes of the song are my own thoughts.

Watching a movie so many times

I enter it and can’t find the exit.

I hope, many years from now, to die

in my office or in the classroom,

and I hope the stench is horrid.

To tell you the truth, I’m good at telling the truth,

good at enduring the cost, and there’s always a cost.