November 10th, 2014

For three whole periods you speak in an accent because you find that it both engages
the students -- who want only to pretend a little longer, to squeeze the last bits
of childhood from their senior year -- and allows you to be better, sharper, funnier
and firmer because there is protection in personae. From behind the accent you do
not blush when you correct them. This cannot last forever, this strange ritual of the
false, but for now you settle into it. You have pretended at many things - pretended
to like the fishing pole, the tool box, the poem, tokens of clumsy love. What you want
is the elegance of a semicolon. You want transition words to slip their long fingers
over your body, between your ribs, along your thigh. You want a smoothing, a sleeking.
You tremble at this desire. You want metaphors to nuzzle your breast and similes to catch
in your throat. You want to be overcome by allusion and style and the subtleties of voice.  
If my brother was an instrument writes a student he would be a loud drum. That's good you
say and she blooms. The room shimmers and moves, the chairs in a sort of dance, the desks
resisting their invitation. You are busy tucking your real self away - mostly your heart.


November 6th, 2014

Full mooned face but not just yet it's tomorrow and you haven't taken the muscle
relaxers but you feel all bent up like a wire hanger that's been through a violent
transcontinental move. You will take them though, in hopes of unlocking secrets
that curl in the center of your sinews and crawl inching through your bones. They
will stuff you up with hot air like a balloon, only you will still end up being the
one the clowns make animals out of, it will still be easy for you to bend in whatever
way is required. In the morning you pull your dripping body off the bed and wring
yourself out - who turned you into a sponge while  you slept? - and you will step
carefully past the puddle and into the shadows of winter dawn. Whatever you find
there will not please you like the muscle relaxers, but it also will not saturate your
body with the loud and pulsing emptiness of drugs. It is more of a filling, an almost
gluttony of every day, the excessses of ugly and beauty. And when you are done with
that day there will be another, and another, each with its own particular high, long
after you have used up the last of the prescription.