bad september haiku with a nod to the site itself...

with hurricane force,

the semester blew in and

flooded the end of

summer, ending my

idyll and forcing a search

for my big rubber

boots. oh, the bigger

the storm, the deeper the muck,

thick with nuance and

new regulations.

i miss the days of carbon

copies, paper trails

trailing purple ink

and fingerprints.  i miss chalk,

a little, too. i

fear i pine too much

for the concrete, nostalgic

for the tangible,

the impossibly

slower past that demanded

no more of me than

my teaching required.

it was enough, that process

of tutelage with

no thought of being

lacking.  now, the management

tells us that we are

counselors, we are

enrollment specialists, we

impact recruitment –

academic crew

shift leaders, paper mongers

in kiosks instead

of classrooms.  in my

decades of teaching, i – all

of us – have become

what many of us went

to college to avoid: cogs,

customer service

reps, civil servants

in the worst sense, valued for

the talking points of

talky recruitment

materials, purveyors

of a bottom line

that bottoms out with

no thought to education.

we are now the sole

focus of soulless

bureaucratic rhetoric

that theorizes

that we don't do our

part for this great machine by

merely doing our

jobs, as though our work

itself – the very stuff of

our academic

dreams – by the hour drains

the company coffers. two

weeks of meetings and

i am done, weakened

and resigned to a life of

college misery.

the misers in their

busywork silos plant seeds

that can never grow,

so far have they grown

themselves away from the real

work of our very

real business: our

obligation to provide

access to power.

two weeks of meetings.

that's all it took for me to

realize this new

reality.  it's

september, a favorite

month, summer waning,

the light changing, some

warmth remaining before the

darkness of winter

storms in.  it's darker

now than i thought it could be,

the brightness fading

into a faded,

distant history, the way

we used to teach and

think and breathe and learn

and grow, before the silos

filled with rancid grain

filled these new landscapes.

i grab my boots, another

garden weekend as

the summer departs,

eager to touch the real soil

into which i may

still plant something that

has a chance to grow, maybe

even thrive.  the ground

is soft with recent

rains, and my hands are as keen

as my brain to find

the fertility

once promised to both.

- Great Lakes Greta