Tales from Olney HS West pt 3

12-16

We sit discussing rockets.
We delete images.
Our coffee is being hand-delivered.
This language is of yo-yos
and candied bulls-eyes.
We live in a world of disc-ed ideas
and disc-ed apologies.
It doesn't take much to think
about little. Or being stupid.
When you wake you are flashbanged.
Think of the worst words you know:
cruel rotting skin sapped in pine ash.

*

My goal, like others, is to relive.
But sifting into childhood is exposure.
Why don't we become wall-hangings?
Let's redefine period-piece thinking.
Let's rezone with electromagnetic
forcefields and the world's biggest pinwheel.
Our coffee is on the way.
There is blood on some pavement
but I am blind to which one.

*

Chris: "He's lunchbox. Burned out."

*

Julius: "Watch out for your body. Niggas gettin' shot. It's close to Christmas. People got bread on them."

*

Today she told me she is pregnant.
She has only known for two weeks.
She has only told four others.
Her brother doesn't even know.
She is so happy and so excited.
To be in on a secret of creation
is like opening a treasure chest
of gold in a shadowy corridor.

*

There are many pages I want to write about
my time here but I fear it will all be
fiction. I want to write what is here and
now but there are too many spaces to fill.

*

R. calculates his salute.
Arms outstretched he
mimics a soldier or criminal
firing a machine gun. Grand Theft Posture.
This air is false.
He speaks of the army like a
simile. His sister, V., shakes her head.
It's a no. He cannot wait.
The idea. It spreads like iced fire. Smiles.
These are the notes I take doing
tests. When disintegrating.
It is silent. Bent head over stranger.
If I don't pay attention I will be chastised.

*

We dreamed of hospitals
and the fields going green.
The steps to the front lawn
and children carrying things.
Our purple eyes were dark
and that image made us think
that every moment after
would come back to our drink.

I am dead, save face,
move it to the wall,
I am dead, save face,
in the backmost of the hall.
I am dead, true taste,
in the underwater room.
I am dead
but watch my body swoon.

Keep the coldest calculation
on the edge of your feet.

Keep up the stones
for the warmth of the tree.

"Yelling makes it harder
for people to hear you." - Ms. P