I remember a Monday Night
Football broadcast
that they interrupted.
I was tying up the phone
that phase in adolescence
between stealing combs
and having cars.
They were telling Amerikkka,
arm chair quarterbacks
and the barflies,
that John Lennon had just been shot.
My favorite English teacher
they weren’t professors yet,
he liked Jethro Tull
explained the Morrison Oedipal Complex
just because I asked,
had cancelled Shakespeare for the day
the shades were all pulled
it looked as if he had been crying,
as he wrote IMAGINE
in dusty and erasable
please-don’t-smear chalk.
And for the entire hour
all we did
was sit there
silent and appalled.
(May 1989)
dia-BLOG-ical 