My University (home schooled)

There is a book, marked and ready

to offer me a lesson 

in each room of the house

where I may find a still moment:

Kerouac is drunk again

and riffing at the kitchen table

on poetry as jazz,

a lecture on life in the year 1215 

is being given in the bath room,

Billy Collins poems 

travel easily with a glass of wine

to the back porch at sunset,

while an essay on Buddhism 

rests on the nightstand

ready to teach enlightenment 

as I begin and end each day.

My desk—-the faculty lounge

where volumes rise in dusty piles

like teachers patiently waiting

their turn at the lectern

as I review the curriculum:

'Poems by Ginsberg'

        (I don't get it, I get it, I don't get it)

'Biographies of Johnny Cash and Art Pepper'

        (why is it always drugs?)

'Atlas Shrugged' 

        (3 more chapters then drop the class...again)

'International Economic Policy in The New World'

        (for that serious student on a serious day).

So remember, dear students,

when we open our books

to the sound of turning pages

and the smell of fading time,

we open our minds

to the collective knowledge of man.

Until next time,

class dismissed.

Ken Owen   Van Niddy Press   August 2014