Sap

Digging through a box of old files, I found this poem I wrote during my first year of teaching. Despite the obvious ripping off of John K. Samson, I still like it. Revisions made today are in italics.

Let's fold up our bad days and shove them in the backs of textbooks,
Hide our fears in the bottoms of lockers, and throw anxiety away in the blue bin by the door.
Let's embrace "how are you's" and recognize how much we really mean them.
Let's hold hands with tomorrow, and let's realize how cheesy that last line was.

Let's forget the things we find in textbooks:
Forget the theorems and Pythagoras,
Forget the scraps of paper,
Forget the meaning of this poem.
Let's forget everything we know except that we know each other.
Let's learn instead that there's so much to learn and that we should be students for the rest of our lives.
Let's be students for the rest of our lives.
Let's learn from each other.
Better yet, let's learn that we've been learning from each other all along.

Let's realize that every breath we breathe ins the most important

In the car in the Northeast, we owned one tape and we listened to it end on end. Now

They say losing love is like a window to your heart: everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody feels the wind blow and we

Better Off Dead

Most people

They protect what is theirs

Superbowl

There are no metaphors on this field:
The plasticine grass simply is, res ipsa loquitur.
This small victory of a yard, 
this pain, these contorted limbs
are nothing more than the thing itself.

The fight is fruitless, the decisions have no impact,
The crippling analysis
beyond the show.

 it is golden in the fire

it is sparkin

aplace

a place

             is a seed you

 hold: a

     live but frozen. I thought I

 held it 

   close enough to keep it warm but it became something

    else. I s

hould have kept it closer. But know it is a tree I do not know.