Alice Cooper’s lyrical anthem

liberation, exhaltation
for kids, teens and young adults
dying in one-room buildings in the country,
over-crowded urban prisons,
prep schools in the hills
struck a chord

in my heart too, so
why can’t I remember the words
anymore?

Sunburns, summer fairs, the fairer sex

and hot, sweaty nights between the sheets
flash forward from
undergraduate to graduate
years of books, typewriters, computers
when I sang along in the shower,
at keggers playing beach blanket bingo
with the bikini-clad.

Today, the professoriate
pounds at my head,
forcing me
to develop projects, grants, articles
point out mistakes
of the imaginative, but raw theses

of graduate students
who hate me
more than they despise the pursuit of

higher education.

Thus, the question begs to be asked:
When did the pardoned inmate
(three-months a year plus Christmas)

become the condemned
life-sentenced
warden
who listens to music from the past
but can never
live the dream
again?