You asked about colleges attended, your hulking mass above us, blocking the light. We knew the move for what it was, a banal violence. Hello, wolf, we thought, noting the borrowed sheepskins. How many others had used it to move us from the pits where we waited for the musicians, our kin, to begin? Tickets please. Tickets. The announcement punctuated by the swing of some blunt instrument pulled from a holster at the hip. And on the train where we rode to visit our mother who was dying for lack of credentials to prove she was worthy of the care needed to live. Tickets, please.
When you asked me about colleges attended, I was seated among others on the ground. We were sharing blankets. Many of us were children, some old enough to have acne; others to have the scars of acne and miscellaneous burns; still others had creaking bones and the tired eyes of the old. When you came to ask me for university credentials––tickets, please––you did not notice. How we had removed our shoes, each of us, recognizing holy ground. This was our school where we sat in the dirt on shared blankets at the feet of dead poets.
It is impossible to argue the exile from certain states of being, but we knew to listen for the music of a torquing tongue arched at just the right angle to halt the bone-crunching gears. It was only a moment, but it was long enough to notice the sound for what it was when it resumed. Your question, too. And we laughed with the ghosts when you left us, and went back to school, and you continued to mutter under your breath about the ignorance of some people, and we waved.
