Confessions of an MA Graduate Student

Shaven Santa Clauses seem to shamelessly hide themselves
In the liner notes of my late night lectures.

They've come to mock me and my Langston-like impressions of literature,
Come to pose my pencil polemically, aiming it for the whites of book jacket eyes.

Targeting my kind of Mickey Mantles, my personal Jesuses of print,
My role models of rhetoric, the legacies of my library.

Turns out, the university saves the worst for last,
Shakespeare's faker than Alice Liddell’s ID.
Wordsworth, a thief, and a bad brother too. Remember,
Will, if you don’t ask, it’s not borrowing, it’s stealing,

And the same goes for hymens, dear Mr. Golding,
Who liked to touch girls who hadn’t bled yet, in his backseat,
Among piles of led stained mole skins. But what can one expect
In a world able to kill off my favorite Beatle, the tooth fairy, and Mickey Mouse.
Who, as of late, I hear hated Mamet, Roth and Ginsberg, among other Jews.
FYI, Allen fucked Dean Moriarty, but the real one,
And each time, was left all the colder and more lacking,
Left with nothing but a poorly written “Dear John” and a shadily rolled joint.

At the very least, I like to think, (It is pretty to do so)
That I would have loved Allen better,
Although we both know he wouldn't have wanted me to,
A starving artist wannabe, who, against her better judgment,
Refuses to further populate Barnes and Noble book shelves
With Anne Rice regurgitated vampire teen fiction.

But each day I hold out and withstand,
I bounce more and more under-the-pillow-checks.
Proving that perhaps the life of the poet, translator, and reader
Was a poor choice. I am just about
To exhaust my stockpile of Edgar Allen dreams within dreams,
About to choke to death on my day job.
Because all I want for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa and Easter
Is to dedicate leather bound pages to the man I love,
To embrace Ernie and T.S. on the mountaintop,
To read Moby Dick and write pretty prose. To sip lattes
And romanticize William Carlos Williams, Ezra, and Gertrude too.

So, yes,
I guess,
In that regard,
It’s not too bad to be a student
Of words, a student of greatness,
Of text and wonder.

Jane Doe

The therapists, the reporters,
The watchers, and me
Dig deep into the confines
Of your hollow mind and your empty wallet,
Trying desperately to find connections
Between the breadcrumbs left behind
From 18 years you have somehow,
And for some reason, forgotten—

On the news, they say your pretty mother died
Young, and your father, so very typical,
Bathed himself in the waters of whiskey.

But, if your father were my father,
All I can think is how mad he’d be
At seeing your hand cut, filthy bangs
Brush against my face. He would agonize
Over how I’d been eating, how and where
I’d been sleeping.

So I need to know. You need to tell me.
Before bed, did he ever bend down low and check
For monsters? What of your mother—
Did she ever sit up with you after bad dreams?
Or were yours the type too busy to discuss
Wockets, pockets, green eggs and ham?

The networks now they’ve found your name,
Your first and your middle, both equally
Unrecognized. They repeat them squished
And ran together, overlapping and rushed.

It makes me angry to hear it that way.
Makes it sound like you’re in trouble,
And it’s all your fault.

I worry that no matter
What you remember, you will never
Be able to explain how one night
You fell asleep on the street,
In the middle of Midtown, with no shoes
And a dirty face, cold, outside, and unfolded
Stretched out on pieces of cardboard dreaming.