The fountain performs its little party
trick, spraying itself here and there,
twisting a litter of beer cans in small

pirouettes across its pool. Under a bench,
flies in pursuit of a nest swarm a banana 
peel. It doesn’t take much, I say

to no one, to accept your own
captivity. In the lawn, the Alpha
Gamma girls, ever innovative,

use their textbooks as tanning mirrors
and the begonias, in the beds
beneath the university crest, appear

to be planning their own funerals.
My phone dings. It is a meme
from my therapist of a cartoon cat

in a dolphin suit declaring:
You cannot become who you want to be
by remaining who you are.

I roll my eyes at myself
for wanting to know
whether the cat knows

that he’s quoting Max De Pree.
When I enter my classroom,
I am confronted

by F U C K H E A D
and a man near death staring back at me
from the whiteboard.