Fourteen is nearly one half

I almost clicked "publish" after typing the title.

What does that say?

Right now I'm being stood up by a student who was supposed to arrive for an independent study meeting at 10 AM.  Did I miss a memo?  If this student is reading this right now (I doubt it), he should feel the deep shame of standing up one of his most awesome professors. At the very least, his ears should begin, at this moment, to burn ... I imagine that he's sleeping in, having somehow missed his alarm or having incorporated its persistent ringing into his anxiety dream.  And now that I'm typing about him, fuming in an ironically detached way in my office, his dreams are turning even more dour -- the monsters that are chasing him are bigger, or (in the off chance that his unauthorized sleeping has produced a happy dream) a dream cloud has just entered the scene, or a dream tidal wave, or a dream avalanche, and he's having to think about running for his dream life.

If you are a student and you're reading this right now, then perhaps a question you may have asked has been answered: yes, we professors do think about you when you're not in front of us. And, yes, we sometimes judge you, or take slightly personally your omissions/failures ... though, admittedly, we shouldn't. We're all independent actors. This particular absence (without excuse? word?) no doubt has nothing to do with me. But I'm human, so it becomes brain fodder, and I begin to spin fantasies around it, not all of them based in the spirit of communio.

Today's poetry prompt: You receive a divine message. It could be from a supreme being, or a deceased loved one, or anything else like having your palm read or tea leaves or flipping through a book to find a passage that speaks directly to you. What is it, and how does it change you? http://poetryprompts.tumblr.com/

*

"I bring you this skull"

Kukulkan Speaks

Woman: You are over
halfway through
a short life,

dying like
the grass.

I bring you this skull
as a sign
of your pathetic impermanence,
and a stern reminder
of the bones
beneath your skin.

Your brain is a gray jelly,
softening every year,
losing light
in sagging folds and
dead ends,
burying experience in
biological blankness.

You will end as silent
as myself,
but you will not share
my golden stone,
my long history,
my feathered brilliance
or my sinuous coils

scaled around the heart
of life,
the blaze
of cosmos.

You can only sit behind
a wooden desk,
spinning black marks
against the nothing,
the non-page --

"You are old & human; a woman; insignificant."

hoping
against hope
for a sort of
afterlife.