Dredge, or The Terrors of Academe

(with apologies to Sylvia Plath...)

The student is perfected.
Her dull

Thesis wears a smirk of slight knowledge,
The illusion of a structuralist method

Flows in the bull of her slogans,
Her bored

Lines seem to be saying:
We have gone nowhere, this says nothing.

Each dry theme inert, a gray worm,
One for each little

Standard idea, now hackneyed.
She has spouted

Them out onto the paper, as droppings
From a brain splat when the pasture

Dries out and sewage seeps
From the shallow well of the starved psyche.

The prof. has nothing to be sad about,
Reading at his desk of stone.

He is used to this sort of thing.
His jowls jiggle and crack.

(1983)