Well, the happy people are going to church, and I'm Left Behind.
Caught in one of those moods
Which I hope Jesus doesn't catch me in on the Last Day.
A mood where the work piles,
The pressures of doing cancel being,
The people waiting matter more than the person plodding.
I have papers surrounding me
to grade with marks which I don't feel like marking.
I have books opened as if they're laying topless on a Mexican beach
demanding stare, sunscreen, self-reflection (and incrimination).
I have cats meowing or pawing the door when they want service,
Needing me, needling me, with inscrutable eyes, claws, incisors:
Yesterday's adorable companions, today's taxi drivers.
Today, I think of all the cost of no pay back,
The long hours; the unfair advantage math instructors have
when I cut famous poetry lines to tape onto cards for four hours.
Gloomy words even like "I heard a fly buzz when I died" or
"About suffering they were never wrong." Stab, slice,
and I'm responsible for being the guide into a field of flowers?
I think I should give.
Crawl back into bed.
Go eat a pile of chocolate cake.
I hope those church folk are singing pretty while I am
burning at the stake for poetry and felinity and
sacrificial lambnity.
As Mark Strand wrote, "Ink runs from the corners
of my mouth" and I agree.
Death such, for an English teacher, would indeed be
an expected kind of bleed.
[I feel better now. Thank you for hearing violins and cats screeching when kicked.]
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