DAY 14: Without a net

Sometimes
my heart is on
the flying trapeze

launched into nothing
but a spinning, free fall
of motion.

My stomach is an acrobat
flipping end over end
in my midsection.

I practice this routine daily.

Each time
I wonder whether you
will be there to catch my
outstretched hand.

DAY 13: Sunday- Another week, another day off

Just got back from peer leadership. Working on the lit mag. Taking the day off.

DAY 12: Day Off

Taking this Saturday off.

DAY 11: Something old

I have to leave for a retreat in 8 minutes. So here is something really old- it is actually the first poem that I wrote for Slamicide.





9:00 am

Third day

British Lit

When He asks arms, crossed,
booked closed,
legs extended…
first row,
“Why do we have to read this?”

And there it is,
the question that sticks
out like a giant hairy mole;
the one on a first meeting that you try to ignore
but you can’t;
so you are left uncomfortable.

And I stall, because I know the
real reason;
it’s what I’m supposed to do.
It is covering the ground set
by navigators that
I know
are
lost.

“Well you see,
Beowulf is a historically
important text to Anglo Saxon culture in England…”

“But we are in America…”

And suddenly my classroom is transformed
to the OK corral,
the showdown has begun
and even though he is right,
I draw and try to shoot him down,
cause, after all

mutiny on the first week is never
a good thing.

“Well, it shows us the cultural ideals…
The hero was what a man should be in that society.”

“But that isn’t our society…”

And he’s right…
We don’t have men willing to
humble themselves,
lay down their weapons,
and fight
bare-handed
because it is honorable.

Weakness hides
behind blue steel,
black powder,
and a trigger.
Cause that’s what
makes a man.

Or else it is six
on one
beat downs in hallways and
bathrooms.
Turbulent seas of baby blue…
as if cowardice has become
something to be strived for.

Boys sulk away from
obligations to new life like
an armless Grendel
to sink themselves deep
into the marshy fen of the
next naïve girl.

Father figures are
fading fast and
what remains are
simpletons
that tell our boys that
passing pills and
making money is
more manly than
doing right.

I want to defend the
planks of these
hall-my Herot,

Rip off my shirt and
stand bare-chested

“You want this place? You gotta get through me first.”

But I know that Beowulf dies
and I’m not sure that I’d take with me
the dragon that plagues our young men.

So I stand there, book in hand--
broken sword.

And fight a
question
that can’t be silenced
or answered
in 180 days.

DAY 10: An apple a day

So in honor of Syracuse, I did a speed writing exercise with my last period class. You throw ou a theme and everyone writes for at least two minutes on that topic. When someone yells STOP, everyone must do just that. The stopper shares and calls on five others. When they are finished, the stopper picks the next theme. Repeat.

Someone threw out the phrase "an apple a day..."

I decided since I need to post and writing poems about fruit will win you a National Indies Champ title that it was worth a shot.




Someone once said
that you cannot peel an apple
inside your imagination.

You could spend hours
thinking of each curve
the way the light reflects off
its skin
be it red, green, or yellow.

It doesn't matter.

Once you try to
slip off the flesh,
strip it of color,
it will change.

The bruises that
appear will shift
their location.
The knife will
melt into another
knife when hidden beneath
waxy skin.
The length of each peel will become distorted.

They also say that
an apple a day will
prolong your life.

But I think that
if you keep trying to peel it,
you will improve
so that as your
last breath slips like
an orchard breeze from your tongue
heaven will appear.

But not as a brilliant white light,
but as a naked apple that will never turn brown
sitting perfectly beside one
complete
unbroken
peel.

DAY 9: Sick Days

Today my hatred of the outdoors
is liquefied
and sloshing around inside my head.

Mucus is an incubated chicken inside of my skull
it is pushing against every side
pressing against eardrums
chipping at the slimy, white prison.

I wish that when I heard it stirring
I could get crocheting needles
and prod into my ears
that have been as congested as the
New Jersey Turnpike since birth.

I would spray those standing too close with
geysers of thick yellow snot
like a liquid light show
that smells like sickness
and ruins clothing.

More than anything, I wish my kids would realize
that the reason that I am screaming
is because they are screaming.
And I in addition to wanting to lance my own ears,
it is painful.
Every time I move my head to shoot one of them a
look like "I will cover you in snow first."
the contents of my head shift
like a poorly packed moving van.

I would take a sick day, but I can't.
I know this is my fault.

This is the same reason that my father set out
pills made of his sickness
the fever that plagued us ever time the temperature rose.
His routine of protected him until the pollen
settled around him with the falling leaves.

If he missed any work
it was for the most serious of ailments.
He never hid from his flaws but instead
took them in until he became immune.

In my class there are 6 empty chairs
in a class of 29.

Maybe it is too easy
to hide from our flaws.
Take a sick day from our problems.

But what if we took them in-
inject indecision under my skin
like an allergy shot,
take two doses of my own passive nature,
and call that someone in the morning-
the girl with that smile that causes me to look away,
the better job that complacency has prevented.

I would spread symptoms and cures simultaneously-
to the close mouthed kid that the only way you are going
to overcome the speech impediment is to speak.

That we need to take in every bit of our
problems until we learn to deal with them,
so that we never have to call in sick again.

DAY 8: Driving/ Not Paying Attention

Well here ia an idea that came to me while driving. It is a new post though nothing to write hoem about. Day 8 down.




I want to tell him it's too late.
That steel plus neglect always equals
screwed to the power of slow decay.

But these are not things you say to someone suspended
fifty feet in the air,
working nights,
pissed off,
with a welder.

But he knows better than anyone
that once water slips like a lover
beneath the sheets of paint
that you either catch the symptoms
or begin the process of deconstruction.

But this overpass has been forgotten
patches of brown flakes
creep up the side like industrial ivy
and these men are asked to revive this city like
some secret garden.

But in the tending of
sparks and flakes
they are sowing
splinters of metal that move when you press them
even years after the restoration.

Their fathers planted
marigolds of sickness in their lungs
through years of
sucking in the pollen of their livelihood.

But some circumstances only allow so much growth.

So sons of blue color grow to
fill the same gaps in the latticework of
Baltimore that their fathers did.
Once this life slips like water into your lungs
You begin the slow drown of blue collar.

Each night as his wife winces
in the dark at the touch of his hands
from the roughness of his neglect,
he wishes that he could turn fingertips like
briars back into
thick mounds of tilled soil.

it's too late
but he already knows that.