From the moment I enter I
am swallowed, engulfed. I become
another pair of shuffling, scuffed feet.
But oh, where do my feet take me? Among
these cerulean passageways that speak
               nothing
of the sea or the sky. Metallic and hollow,
the walls cry the echoes of fity years of
students, fifty years in that L-shaped
building.
     L for ludicrous, they might say. L for
liquid, languid learning that seeps through
brains and lies puddled on the floor,
splashed by those flip-flops and
Timberlands and Vans attached to
feet attached to bare legs or baggy legs
with bare stomachs or baggy stomachs
with heads--
               heads!
--in the asbestos clouds. Stormy skies
where Shakespeare cries, "'Sup, homie?"
and gaping locker mouths find Jane Eyre
and Lenny and Odysseus and Titania
crushed beneath the
               books books books
their brethren pages crushing them to
that literal literary oblivion.
     And what am I learning? Learning! Learning?
Where are you, dawg? 'Cause Lord knows if you
ain't in this building then I ain't gonna find you
          no wheres.