{eddicational distress & eustress}

so earlier in the week, I spent three days teaching with Roger and Celena in a less-than-ideal circumstance -- organizer breathing down our necks with "helpful" suggestions, teachers and administrators freaking out about language but refusing to commit to any real parameters we could follow... it will be a long time before I return to Long Island.

today, I had only three people at my louderARTS workshop, but it turned into an amazing epiphanal experience; after a warm-up exercise, we read a Martin Espada poem to which they absolutely did not respond, finding it simplistic and prosaic and without purpose... until we went through it line by line and all the complexity sprang into clarity and I swear to all that is good I could see lightbulbs switching on in their faces.

I remember that moment, the first time I felt a metaphor blossom in my chest, when Ms. Nickelson presented us a poem called Valediction (by John Donne) that includes a central metaphor of a compass (the geometry kind) where the speaker is the leg that travels and the loved one the leg that stays still and pulls him always back home to center... I remember that window opening in my brain, the AHA of it. and seeing something like that tonight was gorgeous.

so anyway, here's a first draft of a poem about the above.


when Willie says shit

it's as if a mouth caved the length
of the classroom, teachers diving
for their red pens, purses clasping
and unclasping like so many
fat hands and the kids
dip their heads as if to say you don't know
what you're in for, unaware
Anne said bitch to the last class
without alarm or caveat but Anne
also said red sloop in the harbor, said
littleneck clams out of season, said watercolor
and Willie said coño, son, said dios
de bendiga, mano, said word
up, let the monster crawl out
his mouth with its own face on,
called a bottle fight evidence
of love or at least
what it is, proof
life goes on

2.

Anne hangs herself in the back
of the classroom, tongues a gun,
careens a razor along
each wrist, muttering what
does it take to be dangerous
these days

Willie says chingate, son, if I'd said
fuck you in Spanish
nobody would have known
to protest a god damn thing.