Michael Moore

A Student of Architecture

A student of architecture
Who doesn’t look up from the ground
Long enough to study any buildings
Carries my future In a black bra.

The First Day of Class

For SVD

Explain the structure, as they deserve that
And tell them that just because a man cries he is not weak
Though we don’t want to encourage that every day, tell them,
Because there’s work to be done
And tell them about the wetlands
In fact assign a project on it
Projects can be good, tell them, in harmonic collaborationst
And it’s good for the workplace, or something like that
And tell them they’ll fail sometimes, and it’s okay
And tell them about desire and money and ethics and hate
Make stuff up
Tell them we write sometimes in order to learn who we are
And it’s alright because we can erase or delete later
And remind them to eat lunch
Carry a big important-looking red binder but never open it
And be quiet for a while, though not necessarily for questions

Tell them that in matters of love,
some aspects are more encouraged than others
And don’t mention grades right after that
Be “accessible”
Look out the window and tell them no one’s coming
to rescue us from all of this
Or they’d have been here by now
So it’s up to us to wonder, together, about those bumps in the night
And the way our stomachs feel when people show you up
or let you down
And it may not get any better than this, ever, so the curriculum
By necessity will be all encompassing: the nature of imperatives,
Tedium, fear, paragraph transitions, intimacy between sexes,
teenage soldiers,
The part where Ecclesiastes goes on about vexations of the spirit,
Skinning fairies on a bog, quietude and habit, spit, sin, revision.

Above all, be encouraging
Tell them it’s all on the syllabus or on the test,
but you can’t remember which
Tell them that poets have their best interests in mind,
can be trusted, and are straight shooters
above all others; tell them how to pick one out on the street, looking
out the window to explicate the man who stands tall,
has all the luck, and walks in an unrepetitive line toward strangers,
as if that is all he wants.