The Frustrations of the Contemporary Romantic Academician
I I feel fortunate to live in a time when the prisons are schools and the schools are prisons. It is almost laughable brings me into tears and cracks my knuckles to scare the patrollers into thinking I am walking by to end the life to end the journey. Far from it. II And yet the gravity is so strong and drives me toward the center of oblivion. Nature claims another face and all the other faces mourn another loss. But do we cry when the child is flushed away because of a mistake, a threat or an inconvenience? III I find myself writing more and more. And I also find myself shortening the length since the point of poetry is not to display a derivative or an integral. (that’s for next year) and I find that the more I write the more the internal furnaces keep incinerating the coal. Eventually, I’ll meet the collapsing ice and my body will receive a burial of ash and water. But still, you sit on your side of the desk peering down into the eyes convinced of your own truth and reducing me to the simplest fraction. Goddammit.
Date of First Draft: around May 2000