It’s 6:47 in the morning on the F train. 
At first I write something down in a note on my phone, 
that I thought was earnest in the moment, but
on a second read-through 
made me laugh in its self parody. 
Because teachers writing about teaching is like 
walking a tightrope between two lion pits — 
if you cross the chasm to either extreme of the spectrum you’re probably fucked, 
and if you stay on the line long enough, you’re probably fucked too. 
You’re best never hopping on the tightrope in the first place, 
especially if it’s 6:47 in the morning and you’re on the F train. 

The way I see it,
teachers talking about teaching often fall into one of two buckets:

1.
When teachers forget how to be students
they think themselves Socrates
and ask hypotheticals that can’t be answered like:

‘How does one feed fifty minds 
when fifty throats hold back fifty rocks 
lodged in fifty windpipes 
that squeak in fifty tones
a dissonant song that cries 
for fifty generations of abuse,
a song that carried fifty pairs of feet
across the river Jordan 
and vibrated along the length of 
fifty lips that kissed the saccharine
taste of honeyed statutes
that couldn’t wash away 
the salt from their skin,
the salt of the desert that held them
prisoner,
a taste that never goes away
no matter how much molasses 
collects on the tongue
like thick, broken promises?’

Or:

‘How does one feed a brain that’s already 
full on disillusion
and has already learned to taste honey as vinegar and salt as truth?’

Because it’s easier to blame a system than
take your fraction of that blame on the chin.

2.
But sometimes teachers remember how to be students
and they say pretty, perfect things like:

The truth is you don’t. 
You listen. 
You listen to their words,
Words that carry joy,
Words that carry sorrow,
Words that carry strength,
Words that carry anger,
Words that carry wisdom,
Words that carry laughter. 
And you listen in a way that says
I hear you,
I may never fully understand you,
I may never know your experience,
But I hear you,
And if you keep trying, I’ll keep trying too.

But those are perfect, pretty words
like the kind you put in a cover letter
or in a poem,
no closer to reality than the
hypotheticals of Mr./Mrs. Socrates

The truth is,
most days I’m not sure which kind of teacher I am. 
Maybe neither; 
maybe a bit of both. 

The best I can do is
Show up to work on time,
leave an open ear to my students,
keep my desk neat and symmetrical,
avoid speaking in Hallmark card aphorisms,  
settle into my place on the tightrope
between the two lion pits
and hope my best is enough. 

Because its 6:47am on the F train
and this isn’t the time or place 
for teachers to talk about teaching. 

They turned their funny faces to the sun
On 4th and MacDougal
And sucked it down with a reusable straw that they bought from Whole Foods,
Because the earth is dying, like the children on their screens every day
And they drank the sun till there was salt on their lips
And they sighed,
“this is all we can take
         we can grow no more
                  we can sweat no more
                            we’ve had our fill and
                                     we want to go home”
And they ubered back to their 700 square feet

of central air and sage soy candles
And cranked the AC and put ice in their cups,
And they turned on the news
And gave their thoughts and prayers to the children

and they refreshed their feed

and checked the temperature for tomorrow

 
Hands and feet, and knees and elbows.
 The alienated intimacy of the A Train at rush hour.
 When skin meets skin,

does it pull something away?
did I take a part of you with me?
do you carry me on your shoulder?

Are you here with me,
 a fragment of yourself —
 the self that existed as a body
 in that one sliver of space and time?
 Because it was there in that imperceptible moment
 that our granular cells thrashed
 against each other
 like sand heaved up by an undercurrent swell
 and passed from wave to wave.

Hand to hand,
 body to body,
 sea to sea,
 our cells, our sands, our moments
 all leave scuffs on each other’s sleeves.
 My sand is red, yours blue, his green, hers purple,
 except they’re not red
 or blue, or green, or purple —
 they’re each a shade that’s
 distinctly one’s own,
 a theoretical hue that lies
 in the infinitude between RGB codes,
 not a single one just like it.

We commute from point A to point B in a sandbox.
 The colored sands — her sands, your sands —
 all brushing and crashing against one another,
 exchanging and collecting,
 limbs
 that collide and collide again
 until you finally hit your stop,
 and you flood out into the streets with
 the wet heat of July in New York on your neck,
 and you walk and dilate
 at the thought of taking your shoes off,
 and all of the moments you
 picked up along the way tickle your feet
 like that time you fucked up
 by wearing your sneakers to the beach
 and regretted it for a week.
 Except you’re not at the beach,
 you’re in alphabet city,
 and when you take off your shoes
 and turn them over,
 they pour out a rainbow

I wonder if the earth shook when the titanosaurus fell
And it’s bones and scales settled
Twisted arabesque, last breath death-
Pose; crooked neck
I saw a bird’s nest fall once, ten years old
And from my chest, felt it all
the reverb, you should’ve heard it
It barely made a sound
But it shook the earth

Sirens.
Shoulders hunched, Parisians line the streets.
Mothers kissing daughters, chest-swells of relief
Thankful it was not their daughter, thankful it was not their —
Sun to their backs, neither East nor West.
Three shots ring out.

Sail on, sail on.

Three shots ring out.
From earth to earth again,
The hands move swift and fold the flag
The hands move swift and find their mark
Polished wood against skin, the soil speaks,
“Be still, child, you’re coming home.”
They tell you in the baby books, you know,
That it’s dangerous to leave an infant sleeping on its back,
But there is nothing left to harm this child.
She sleeps, back against the wood, chest towards the sky
In the carriage of stillness and quiet,
She sleeps in the chest of the other Mother now.

Bodies shuffling, the crowd draws pause
Silenced by the thunder, hushed by the
Sirens.

Three shots ring out and startles the herd.
Blood-panicked eyes, rapturous cries –
“Liberté, equalité, fraternité.”
Three words but one body,
She’s heard across the sea.
Carrying more weight than lead, she rises.
Atlas-shoulders pulled back, wings outstretched
She catches the glint of Sol, as she flies transatlantic,
“Carry me, brother,” she says to the sun.
The great flame dips behind Big Sur, and she, the trinity,
Carries her message across the continent,
“Liberté, equalité, fraternité!”

As all children are taught,
What falls in the west, ascends in the east
But today, the darkness clings to the chariot,
Unseen tendrils tear at the yokes,
Wide-eyed horses strain and groan against the weight
And for a moment the world holds its breath,
Unsure if the sun will raise its orange crest above the horizon,
Disbelieving that the city can ever emerge from its sublunar veil,
That laughs can still be laughed,
That the earth has not been dislodged from its course
Cast away from its orbit,
And left to freeze and burn in the great vacuum.

Blood runs thicker than water,
But is vapor in the shadow of ink.
The chariot emerges.
With the dawn at the heels of Helios,
The perennial hammer-blows of the pen strike against paper.
Breathing new life into infant lungs with each breathless stroke,
They lift the children from the kingdom of this earth.

Sail on, sail on.