What Was Already Breaking
I decided to open this collection with poems that pay attention to what usually gets waved away. Unlike some of the following poems, these aren’t about a single bad decision or a dramatic turning point. They focus on the conditions that laid the groundwork for these decisions, the habits, the language, and the quiet trade-offs that feel manageable right up until they aren’t.
These poems were written inside institutions that claimed to value stability, planning, and reassuring transparency. What appears instead are patterns: how authority talks, how work gets redistributed without being named, and how loss is softened, renamed, or ignored. Nothing here is especially hidden. That’s kind of the point.
This opening group serves as a roadmap for what follows. The poems that come later are sharper, but they rest on what was already strained long before anything officially fell apart.
A Simple Reminder
Untruth is uncouth;
Candor’s far grander.
Note: This poem is intentionally derived from Ogden Nash’s Reflections on Ice-Breaking. It was one of the first poems my father taught me because it was so short. I didn’t understand it for decades.
Counting the Grain
Fresh starts every autumn and every spring
Except for this one, where
The empty days stretch ahead
Like the vacant office that once was mine.
Sabbatical sounds strong, sounds promising
But for me who always worked,
There’s only an empty sense of dread
Like stores left unmeasured,
For winters I cannot yet see.
The excitement of new beginnings –
Polished syllabus, open doors –
Taken in one fell swoop
By the king who knew not Joseph.
She shrewdly dealt in promises and spun
Tales of inevitable abundance,
Ignoring who stocked the warehouses
When the famine first arrived.
Her fresh start begins today.
Mine does not.
For now, the stores still hold, but
She never counts the grain
Or anticipates the fall.
An Accountant’s Lament
Housman wrote of a land of lost content
A place we all pass through;
And though we cannot go back again,
We mourn what we once knew.
For many, that land of lost content
Was where learning reigned supreme,
Where students wandered in and out,
And everyone could dream.
A small and vibrant college,
Where professors knew your name
Guided you toward who you’d be,
And no one left the same.
But slowly profit claimed the reins,
The finance office redrew the map.
Curriculum turned assessment-heavy,
And the heart fell through the gap.
It wasn’t prudent budgeting
That bled the mission dry,
But trading vision for the chase
Of profits piled up high.
A margin sought with wisdom
Has never been the crime.
But strategy without the students
Fails every single time.
A college cannot chart the course
By spreadsheets, black or red.
For once the mission comes second,
The school’s as good as dead.
Command Without Care
Somewhere she learned to prize command over care
Mistaking cruelty for competence, coldness for fair.
Her method makes the outcomes painfully clear
She should not hold the reins of anything we hold dear.
She leads with iron certainty and absolutely no skill,
And the cost of her conviction is a campus growing still.
She brought in her guard dog to keep us all in check;
He snaps and scolds, creating fear like an oncoming wreck.
He polices every report as if mercy were a crime.
A junkyard dog who lunges hard at any step out of line.
She leads with iron certainty and absolutely no skill,
And the cost of her conviction is a campus growing still.
She brandishes her “strength” much louder than she should,
Yelling at a dean in public, just to prove she could.
She marched one from dialogue they were invited to that day,
A bully with a junkyard dog who only knows one way.
She leads with iron certainty and absolutely no skill,
And the cost of her conviction is a campus growing still.
The buildings wheeze with broken heat and temps that will not hold.
Water leaks through ceilings, bills uncounted, uncontrolled.
Mold climbs dormitory walls; the hallways smell of death.
Students learn what stillness costs when they dare not take a breath.
She leads with iron certainty and absolutely no skill,
And the cost of her conviction is a campus growing still.
She speaks of fiscal acumen but shows us nearly none.
How did she keep her job when the covenant came undone??
Bonds were downgraded; auditors prepared to balk,
Yet she stood firm, untouched, while others had to walk.
She leads with iron certainty and absolutely no skill,
And the cost of her conviction is a campus forced to still.
We Say The Words We’re Supposed To
“We value all your input,”
Said the leaders to the staff.
Surveys, polls, and town halls
They put on quite the show.
They packaged up their findings,
And shared them far and wide.
Too bad the sentiments reflected
Didn’t match the ones supplied.
“We value all your input,”
Their faces all held bland.
But when the committee said no
To the president’s big beautiful plan
To staff Admissions with her friend
The committee was overruled.
Now they live together on campus
As if we all were fooled.
“We value all your input,”
They earnestly alleged.
They asked the Council to advise
On how to change the College.
Gave them 10 short minutes
Said they’d come back for more.
But once the weekend passed,
The structure was no more.
“We value all your input,”
They repeated, “come what may.”
‘Til the students came to protest
And the leaders were “away.”
The reporters told the story.
Otherwise, even today
No one would know what happened
If the press weren’t in play.
“We value all your input,”
They said with a brittle smile.
But those who love this College
Now see through and revile
The lies, deceit, and mismanagement
Under the guise of “leadership style.”
It hurts to watch our mission die
When they missed it by a mile.