On Administering The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Standards to The Behaviorally Disordered Classroom, South High School

I watch them.These are my boys

and they are the dregs,

the bottom of the barrel,

those who would sooner be forgotten.

 

Truly, it can be a challenge

to find something redeeming…

To call them rough around the edges

would be to ignore the fact

that they are rough all the way through.

 

If we call them a mite lacking in refinement,

so too, should we call oil bleeding out of the ground and sticking to our shoes.

 

But they are my boys

and I watch them.

Pencils desperately bubbling, erasing, bubbling, erasing, bubbling erasing

until it does not matter

whether they are right or wrong

because the machines will not possibly discriminate

between erasures and markings, by the time they are through.

 

I can see by their wild eyes

how all my instructions

how all their work

is leaking out the deadly-sharp tips

of the yellow number 2 pencils.

 

I look over at the other student in my class.

He is not officially enrolled. And he is invisible.

He was expelled from the MacArthur School for forms of fair of Accountabality.

My secret student is not a gang member, an almost-grown crack baby, or a juvenile deliqnuent.

He is an anthromoprhism, a personification.

His problems are legion.

 

I can only hope that he has a brother, a former classmate, somebody, anybody

will graduate the school he’s been expelled from

And I can only pray

that then this will all make sense.

 

 

A Transfiguration

 

A transfiguration 

She felt the happenings deep inside of her;

Not a change but something deeper.

 

She felt lighter in a way that no scale would recognize

A sort-of evaporation.

She was turning away from who she was

into only

everyone’s idea of who she was.

 

If you could only see

the way her eyes would light up with the hope of that completion

You’d feel sad with me.

 

But atleast we would know.

No one else would know.

They would all still see her feel her touch her taste her

and no one had ever heard her, anyway, so what difference would there be?

 

She would go on, fulfilling everyone’s expectations

forever.

Perhaps it is a mercy that there’d be nothing left of herself

to know that she should have had so much more.