College (an imitation of "America" by Allen Ginsberg)

College you’ve taken the best years of my life.

College a quarter tank of gas Spring Break 2016.

I don’t like my brain.

College when will we defeat ignorance?

Take your answers and go straight to hell.

Leave me alone I’m thinking.

I won’t declare my major until I know who I am.

College when will you be enlightened?

When will you be as diverse as your brochures?

When will you deserve your great minds?

College why are your lecture halls built on broken dreams?

College why couldn’t you teach me to be happy in the same way you taught me how to

integrate functions written in spherical coordinates?

College Foucault is making me an anarchist.

I’m tired of your system.

College don’t you see we’re all brilliant in our own way?

Your lectures are too loud for me.

You told me I should want to be rich.

There has to be a better way to have this debate.

College how can you liberate me if you’re burying me in debt?

College why do mental illnesses always seem to manifest themselves in your libraries?

College why are most of my best friends either books or caffeinated beverages?

I almost had a thought.

I’ll never make up my mind.

College stop trying to tell me who I am.

College your ivory tower is crumbling.

I haven’t been to a football game in years we lose all of the time anyways.

College I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a farmer.

College I used to lay bricks in the summers and I loved it.

 

College I am a white man most philosophers are white men and almost all of the books you told

            me to read were written by white men when can you show me the world and my place in

            it through someone else’s eyes?

College why do you charge so much for tuition?

College are you worried about going out of business?

College you realize that as long as the people who are working on solving the world’s problems

            and the people who are creating new problems for the world are on your payroll at the

            same time you have nothing to worry about, right?

 

I skip class every day that I can.

I lie in bed for weeks at a time staring at the ceiling.

When I go to parties I always drink too much and never have any fun.

I’ve decided to rebel.

You should have seen me working in the factory.

I won’t do a keg stand.

I have dark thoughts and bright ideas.

My emotional physical and psychological health are declining but at least I know

            the various solutions to the Schrodinger equation.

 

I’m trying to have a conversation.

Are you going to let your curriculum be decided by the job market?

I constantly ponder the job market.

I look for jobs every day.

The signs for the job fair line the walks to my philosophy class.

I consider the job market while I’m eating beans camping in my tent.

It’s always telling me I should make a lot of money. Doctors want a lot of money. Chemists want

            a lot of money. Everybody wants a lot of money except me.

Sometimes I worry that I am college.

I am contradicting myself again.

 

The uneducated want to kill me.

I’ll be on the ends of their pitch forks in no time.

I should think about what I can offer.

I have a tattered backpack thousands of suicides 1.2 trillion dollars in student loan debt an empty

            idea journal and millions and millions of liberal arts degrees.

Not to mention my publications or the thousands of undergrads suffocating from the air filling

            my classrooms.

My goal is to find the Truth despite the fact that I know it doesn’t exist.

 

College how can I write my paper with your constant buzzing?

I’ll trudge on like Lewis and Clark my thoughts as uninhabited as the territories they explored.

College for a limited time only I’ll sell you two of my ideas for the price of one.

College stop Donald Trump.

College save free speech.

College black lives must matter.

College I am the 99%.

College if I can hear the colors of the trees outside of my window vibrating does that mean I had

            too much coffee?

College after high school I was a house keeper in New Zealand my coworkers where uneducated

Filipino immigrants they were so kind none of us had any money but we got along and

we were all happy life was simpler in 1491 and Walden Pond sounds like a nice place to

raise a family. We must all be crazy.

College you don’t really want to give your students a better future.

College I never had the chance to thank you for the anxiety migraines and panic attacks that

            made me miss half of my classes sophomore year.

 

That ain’t no good. Shiiiit. You wanna make people talk good.

College this is ridiculous.

College this is how it seems walking around our campus.

College am I right?

Well I suppose I should write my poem now.

It’s true I don’t want to be rich and I’d rather be happy than know calculus

            besides my calculator just happens to be broken at the moment.

College I’m putting my calloused hands all over your quill.

***

(Sterling, CO -- March, 2016)

My task over spring break during that very same poetry class was to write an imitation poem. I was stuck on this for a long time until, as I crossed the border into Colorado on a semi-ill-fated road trip to the Grand Canyon, inspiration struck! I pulled off of the highway to spend the night in Sterling, Colorado. I sat on the hood of my 2001 Buick Century in the parking lot of the motel with my notebook and my Ginsberg book open on my lap as the sun set, jotting down all of my frustrations with my time in college.