Professor

his eyes are always misanthropic
wet and wildly myopic, hidden behind
Coke-bottle lenses. atop, the fuzzy skuzzy eyebrows
of a Muppet vault black rimmed walls.
hair almost always askew, seeming as if
he can’t even see you, a dollop
of shaving cream behind his left ear
as if perched precariously on the bone
a slice of mandible pie served up ala mode

he pats down the Pachydermian pockets
of his misaligned jacket, feeling the tug of an Idea
at the end of his line, even while we look back
with the eyes of dead-end harbor fish.
and he speaks of bow tie philosophy while
the crinkled cuffs of his shirt peek out
two nervous newly minted soldiers,
scholars, forced into the foxhole of Western Civilizations
unsure what to do in even these classroom situations

But O! when he speaks of great men,
of dead men, he seems to speak then
for those who have no tongues but speak today,
for all those with empty lungs but words to say,
a Lorax for Nietzsche and Hegel and Marx
for Heidegger, Rousseau and Jean-Paul Sartre.