Professor at the Party

The music of your adolescence plays
As you step through their doorway.

It flatters and amuses you, although you know
It’s merely sport -- to dress the diorama:
Supposing smugly you’re still holding court,
You fail to see your placement's been arranged
To flaunt their sense of irony and drama,
Juxtaposing you with young and pretty things
Like dueling gallery curators.

Soaked in lust, suburban shame, and bourbon,
Toxic with regret and deference, failure burning
Through your rusting skin and brain cells.
At the speed of smell, these hardened young
Can tell a swelling sponge of desperate dying age,
Your graven masquerade among the garden-dwelling;
Selling only spite, you pour the stale, fermented rage
Of balding, private dictators.

They boast, “the play’s Our thing,” and mean to kill a king.
They Act; they need no words,
No words, No
Words to say:

You can’t take your class from us, not anymore --
With your coarse lectures spilled over your glasses,
Your acidic glances and your hovering, lecherous looks,
Your covering the same old books,

Your dark imagined romances,
One-too-many sour divorces, your 
Contrived and passive power gesture
Of referring our first-discovered lives 
And loves to "classic" sources,
Like some ancient-glory masturbator.

Yes, you used to roam here,
Grazing on the opportunities of youth
Allowing fattened fears like sows to root around,
But now, we, lions, pounce and choke them down
Then laze away tomorrow’s sun.

Yes, now, you’re just irrelevant in the room,
Unnoticed by the frail and waning moon
Illuminating cool and fading tombstones of long-slain gladiators.

Pressure

 

These uniforms may be the last public reminder of their essential sameness -
A quaint official token that their norms have just begun to change.

Shorts and jerseys, soon they'll shed these as metamorphosis accelerates;
They'll paint new garish hues on outer forms to match the inner range

Of rage and vigor, perk and venom just beneath the roiling surface of the skin.
Their shifted, swelling landscapes shudder over storms, and they exude the strange

Magnetic condensation free of toxic sediments built up by fear and sin,
Regret and suffering and loss, of failures borne as their lives rearrange.

Well, so we elders tell them when we practice our clever barometry,
Forgetting that the pressures that transform them into us ever subside with time,

But stretch them almost to their tightest point-
Like shrunken, faded gym outfits that we once wore.
We have no sure idea what it's like to have no sure idea anymore.