Happy Campus

This is the dirt-eating poetics that’s gotcha

The dirt-eating poetics you’ve been yearning for.

You did good, you did something you hadn’t before

Contorted yourself into optimal stances.

You persisted with your dirt-seeking impulses.

ii

When the garden trail came to a sudden dead-end

You celebrated by dreaming as a log might

Calling forth decomposition’s cute sister, life.

A single crushed can of rosé strewn thereabouts

Is all you, too, at maximum inflection point.

iii

But here you are back at the plazas of commerce

Into the routines of knowledge dispensation.

Here too you contort yourself to what’s most pressing

These happy or grim faces of late empire’s throng.

You do a sort of bump dance; attention glides up.

iv

At noon, the plazas clear themselves of their contents.

Overhead, a Boeing seven thirty-seven

Roars for curious ears; streaks of places to be

Fade, till the next industrial jolt wakens you.

Time for a quickie jaunt among ferns’ spongy soil.

v

This is the dirt-lavishing poetics at hand

A flexed forearm gripping a bulky book at dusk

Gives way to dalliance with penciled sprites at dawn

A picnic in the style of twenty twenty-two

Keen to supply lines of microchips and maidens.

vi

fuel is what’s on tap today, sparking up form’s forms

Combustions, pipelines, canalizations of fire

How the plazas themselves are poetical feats.

You can deem yourself a fallen log at midnight

Or rally the concrete under your feet to flight.