Professional Ghost

I am a ghost
and I am leaving now
this haunted house of academic spirits
of greed and competition
of desire and power run amok
of childish tantrums
and wasted millions
on fluff heads and bald heads
of pseudo-intellectualism
hard knocks
on a soft reality
men and women
without hearts
students learning to mimic
empty smiles and the rules
of containment of one's values and soul

I was haunted by the spirit of lies and myths
and by the rumors of my own fictional identity
that I was strange and probably even a witch
that I couldn't teach my way out of a paper bag
that my students had all been brainwashed into
giving me those excellent marks
and that I dangerously
threatened the formalism
required to maintain
legal traditions

But I know
I spoke from my heart
and my brutal desire for honest connection
and I learned to pray in my office
before opening the door to another
bitter confrontation
with the coldness of indifference
and the antics of fear
that are the world of politics
little and small
by men mostly
carrying fat cigars
tugging at their groin
and never stopping to look
at the love in the stars

I am a ghost of my own creation
of a woman who is only now learning
to howl like a wolf
in search of mountains high enough
to carry my voice to the winds
to the people I touched
with a radical thought now and then
and dangerously warned of the
intimate connections between life,
lust, love, and the law

Yes I am a ghost of many complexions
red for the embarrassment I have felt
when I made mistakes
pink for the dozens of times I laughed freely
in the moment of flowing ideas between my
heart my mind and the moment of seeing
the light bulb switch to "on" in a student's head
I am a green ghost when I jealously think
of the people who did find a home
on this haunted hill
and I am a grey ghost
when I remember that I
spent thousands of days and hours in worried
agonizing and painful reflection
of the time it has taken
to learn a simple lesson
that ghosts are both alive and not
and that the mysteries of the past
including the reasons for my coming
here
are no clue to my future
that I was neither killed by my enemies
nor was I murdered by my own self
but I did
like a ghost only whisper
in these halls
the essence of my being
which is a truer and open heart
than the one I came with eight years ago
the one I reclaim now
as I leave this house of spirits both evil and good
and the memories of the moments
when I did come alive
even though I had been resoundingly
confirmed
as professionally dead.

Fall 1999 (upon clearing out my first professor's office).