This is a poem.
This is another one of those poems that
is an analogy for a generation that has already probably
been written too much about--
'60s, '70s.
And this poem makes reference to the fact
that I'm hard of hearing.
I make my living by teaching, and I'm hard of hearing.
So it's often I have to cup my hand
behind my ear in classroom, in order to tell who is talking
and to hear what they're saying.
It's sort of hard to triangulate on where
the voice is coming from.
And this poem is speculation about how
I might have lost my hearing.
It's imaginary rock concert in the past, and it's called,
The Teacher Listens To The Past.
Somewhere, someone is asking a question.
And I stand, squinting at the classroom
with one hand cupped behind my ear,
trying to figure out where that voice is coming from.
I might be already an old man, attempting
to recall the night his hearing got misplaced.
Front row, center, at a battle of the bands, where
a lot of leather-clad second-rate musicians,
amped up to dinosaur proportion, test
drove their equipment through our ears.
Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled
and sprayed us with machine gun riffs,
as if they wished that they could knock us,
quite literally, dead.
We called that fun in 1970, when we
weren't sure our lives were worth surviving.
I'm here to tell you that they were.
And many of us did, despite ourselves,
though the road from there to here
is paved with dead brain cells.
[LAUGHTER]
Parents shocked to silence and squad cars
painting the whole neighborhood, the quaking tint
and texture of red jelly.
Friends, we should have post-marks on our foreheads
to show where we have been.
We should have pointed ears or polka-dotted skin
to show what we were thinking when
we hot-rodded over God's front lawn and death kept blinking.
But here I stand, an average-looking man,
staring at a room where someone blond, in braids,
with a beautiful belief in answers
is still asking questions.
Through the silence in my dead ear,
I can hear the future whisper to the past.
It says that this is not a test and everybody passes.
[APPLAUSE]
All the people who are clapping have fringed vests
in the closet at home, right?
[LAUGHTER]