... my middle name

she bring me love love love love, crazy love.
—Van Morrison

To Be Read In 500 Years
by Albert Goldbarth

If they're right, the whizkid physicist-theorist thinktank guys,
suggesting that every acted-on decision of ours produces a brachiation
in the timestream (therefore, two simultaneous independent futures:
for example, one extending from my use of "brachiation,"
one extending from my almost-use of "fork," so that
tomorrow-"b" and tomorrow-"f" are equally real in parallel
and coexistent tracks), there may be, secretly among us,
a few—or even entire populations—of backward travelers
in time from not just one, but many, "alternamorrows,"
so different from ourselves, it's like the thought that bitch-ho' rap
and the sublimities of, say, Chopin are kin enough to both be
reproduced by variant patterns within the same 88 keys:
in one
of these futures, everything essential, every attribute of humanness
even minimally desirable, is relegated to mind alone
—we look like cumulonimboid dendrite-structures
that have flowered out of small deflated flesh-pods—
and the reproductive function of the species now
is entirely exocorporal, a matter of frozen protein combinations
and gestation-sacs of complex bioplastic;
in another
of these futures—it's an after-we-squander-the-oil-deposits world
of post-apocalyptic, bare-subsistence living—a day
is a matter of thinning, granular soil: leached,
defiant of yielding to our human need and its desperate threshing
—that, and a rumor from over up north that dog troops
of marauding goons are on the march with pillage and worse
asquirm in their eyes—and there, and then, all softness,
all of anything without "survival value," has been bred out
of the race, so "interpersonal relationship" is no more
than a reflex of the genes;
or, au contraire,
another future makes an ornate, public fetish of the wooing game
—a codified fantasia of modes of address and rank and dowry
and clan and feather-on-cloak-by-depth-of-genealogy, etc.—
to a social architecture of such overmuch extent that, while it's all
intensely focused on the establishing of a betrothal-pair, it's
all at the same time so bound up in duty and cultural sanction
as to be even more devoid of anything personal—anything soulful
and open to flutter—than the future I've described
of petro-aftershock ...
and therefore none of these baffled representatives
encamped in our twenty-first century can understand,
can "get," the thump, the cupid-zing, the woe and the wow,
in our songs and poems, especially the songs, especially the glowing
uranium dump that malingers all night at the bottom of the blues,
oh especially the blues, especially let her light shine down
on me, especially by the waters of Misery Avenue, let's not forget
Heartbreak Hotel, let's not eschew its transient cast
of cinders-and-ashes clientele, but also the songs of tra-la-la
and marital abidingness, of how sometimes a body fits a body
as indivisibly as waves (or it could be particles) fit light, the poems
address this too of course, the let me count the ways, the roses
in their fragrant and meaty botanical abundance, and the doves,
let's not forget the doves, the old thou art a summer's day
and thy breasts are of wheaten beauty, let's not dillydally
in recognizing
the wedding under the laws of God, let's not exempt the quickie
under the snooker table, the flame in the bones, the one name
drummed
in a bruising tattoo on the heartskin, they don't comprehend this
sugartit thing,
this sonnet thing, this sky held in the mirror pools
of the Taj Mahal on a day of slowly promenading couples
thing, these people of the future as I've imagined them don't have
the apparatus of leisure we've had, in a special lotus of time
that's been vouchsafed to us, a mythos, a sequestering in which
this serotonin and this opium are grown to a lyric degree, they
wouldn't
understand me sneaking out at 5 AM to pat that ten-dollar valentine
tenderly into place beneath the wiper-blade of Phyllis's swayback
Dodge
(with the fishtaily brakes and the fanlight crack in the windshield),
they
don't know the drive-in, the down at the corner, the boardwalk,
the bridge,
the places where it happens and where we commemorate it,
also a night
of blind and driven howling I pulled like an hours-long ebony scarf
from the deeps of my brainstem once on Morgan's lawn, so sweet
it is, this ineluctable thing, this please let one of the harder sciences
objectify
the biochemical basis of our here-do-that-to-my-earlobe-another-time
thing, down by the riverside, at the gates, behind the stadium,
and Skyler my wife with the basement tiles and cowboy pajamas,
she lift me up, she bring me the dominions of the morning
and the thrones of the moon, they've never once experienced this
impossible night of her wanting him down to the vitamins
and the pepsin and the aura and the spit, and how she bring him
the molasses and the escrow and the skidmarks and the holy church,
the rock and the water, the star and the stain, together we heard
the otherworld hosannas of wind in the alders, not to mention
karaoke screech, the Gregorian chant and the triple-x rebel yowl,
it requires a certain coddled recipe of history and maybe economics
for this psychic condition, this giddiyap of the hormones
and the industry they generate, the castles and the sly decolletage,
I wanted to read her the works of Montaigne and Cervantes
and Emerson
and I wanted to slip her some tongue, I was enrolled, I stayed
the course from my first day in Agony 101 to my post-doc,
they will never
be burned by this ice, they will die without knowing the thirst
in this river, she bring me the spackle, she give me the flying tackle,
he build her up, he tug her plug and she drains, she becomes
a puddle of ouch, she hit me with the hoodoo, with the magic spell
and the candle, they will never know this candle, yeah
she lead me up the towpath got a diamond in my nose, she dress
in ermine and sable, she barefoot in the grass, I tossed,
I thought of words like chivalrous and serenity, I spied on her,
I wanted to kill for her, she bring me the cherry wine, the toxic waste,
the whole wheat and the half-shell, they will never eat of this fruit
and suffer its consequences, never beg for its juice, its family root,
she be my guide, she interlocutor, my Beatrice-and-Virgil
(and me behind
in my Dante sandals following her shake-that-thing on the stony path),
my rash, my silty unguent, she rob him, she rock and throb him,
she greet him in his guise as the charioteer of the sun in its vast
celestial passage, in the centuries forthcoming they will never know
this honeycomb of confusion and its confected delight, it happens
in the jazz bar, at the casbah, in the synagogue, under the sheets,
she lift me higher, she be my desire, she build me, she give me,
in the sand dunes, hot hot summer, on the roof, yes here, now here,
a little lower, she feed me, she give me, she lift me, she need me,
the sound of the continents as they first tore apart and the surge of
the oceans,
the music of that, the songs especially but also the poems, she take me,
the rosins of craving, the tables of lust in its periodicity, they cannot
and cannot and cannot partake of this feast and the terrible emptiness
that follows, she make me, she lift me, I freely give her one grand
opera rose
and hiphop dove, she under my skin, she knife in my mind,
this thing,
oh this millennial and hallucinatory and radiant thing, she bring me,
she lift me, she take me, she bring me love
love love love crazy love.

A friend of mine said it best in an email I received this morning ....

"Happy Wednesday! For me, every day is an opportunity to express love and be loved"

"Santa Claus Van Damme"

Early today, a former classmate of mine sent this to me. Kids can really be both mirrors and sponges at the same time, reflecting all the beauty and all the ugliness in the world with a clarity too honest for adults. On Super Bowl Sunday I called my parents and, after assuring them I was eating healthy and getting enough sleep, was passed around to the rest of the crew assembled to watch the game. My niece (who recently sent me a colored drawing of hearts and rainbows, inscribed “You are the coolest! Go D!”) excitedly told me that they were learning about the different states in school and that all of her friends thought Mississippi had the coolest flag.

. . .

No, her teacher didn’t explain what the flag represented. She had no idea; most fourth graders probably don’t. I tried my best to give a brief synopsis of slavery, the civil war and the current state of affairs while a rain-soaked Peyton scored another TD in the background and her little sister whined to have her turn on the phone.

At what point does this innocence become ignorance, and intolerable? I recently heard a story from a friend who was sorting laundry with her young son a few days after he learned all about MLK in preparation for the holiday and, you know, the inequality he’s sure to encounter first or second hand as he grows older. The conversation went something like this;

Mother: “Put the whites in one pile and all the darks or coloreds in the other.”
Son: “I know Mom, we learned about that in school today with Martin Luther King Jr.”
Mother (taken aback): “What do you mean? This is just what we have to do with laundry, not people.”
Son: “Why?”
Mother (assuming he meant, ‘Why separate the laundry?’): “When you wash clothes, if you mix colors in with whites you will ruin the whites.”

. . . she immediately realized what she had just said, and put down the laundry to clarify for him.

Hopefully he understood.

Night School

When it becomes difficult to face the day to day, I plan for tomorrow ... been doing a lot of that lately.

... and thinking, not much doing but a lot of thinking. Some resolving, perhaps.

Just got back from a late-night run and not quite ready for more schoolwork ... nor for the half-marathon I'm going to try for in just over a week. The candle-lit, open-book bath (more so as not to see the light brown colored water I lay in than for ambiance) I just arose from has me feeling kinda contemplative, so rather than curl up in front of the fire with more failing papers to grade, I'll blog a bit. I passed Kermit twice tonight, going and coming, which made the circuit close to a five mile loop along the creek. A soft shower was falling, almost looking like snow in the glow of the street-lights, raindrops trailing down my cheeks like warm, spring tears. Running works out my muscles and my mind, burning off calories and anxiety equally.

Leland was asleep for the most part, the streets quiet save for my heavy breathing and the rhythm of my sneakers on the pavement, only a few lights still on in the homes that I passed by. I jogged passed a group of ducks on the shore of the creek beside Leland High School, wide awake and quacking away in a loud chorus. Along one dark and open stretch of road cutting through an expanse of fallow fields, beyond the creek, the houses and the street-lights, I felt my pace and pulse quicken. Alone, between the distant lights of Greenville dotting the horizon and the pockets of stars blinking between clouds, my steps grew lighter and quicker ... apparently at my best when I'm certain that nobody is watching. Or just more afraid. I laughed at the 'Slow Children At Play' sign (never gets old ... Darwin would have ran them over), and was startled, again, by the unexpected presence of the three wise men, life size mannequins still lingering from Christmas, standing amongst the shadows at a particularly dark bend in the road.

Had a really good weekend past. After an easy Friday at school and orange juice with oatmeal cookies at the home of my mentor teacher, Mike and I sped up Route 7 to Oxford just in time to meet Grace and Lily for the Angela Davis lecture. From the Ford Center we made our way over to the Oxford Film Festival for 10 mph. After a midnight snack at Huddle House, I kept awake to talk the hours away in our hotel room before passing out not long before it was time to get up again for class. Saturday, after class, a few of us drove over to Lake Patsy where we ran around as the sun set, kicking the soccer ball or each other then collapsing by the water's edge. From Patsy to pizza, then another movie and more late night Days Inn conversations. Exhausted, Mike and I drove back refreshed, somewhat, after sleeping in on our first Sunday morning in Oxford. Not in any hurry to get back to the scattered paper piles and unfinished lesson plans, we pulled off the highway once into the Delta and got ourselves lost and got the truck covered in mud along a few unmarked dirt roads. Back in Indianola, Mike left me at school where I had left my car on Friday. Intending to get some work done in my classroom before catching our senior class play in the gymnasium that evening, I was easily convinced instead to hop into a pick-up game out on the field with some of the guys I coached in the fall. The sun was out, it was another beautiful day in what had been a gorgeous weekend and I was feeling fairly young and free. After trying my best to not show my age on the football field, goddamn that sounds strange, and making it to the gym for the second half of the play, I promptly went home and fell asleep ... and didnt get up until today ... Tuesday.


The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep – Robert Frost

El Sur

That little furball in Gobbler’s Knobb didn’t see his shadow, so spring must be on its way ...

BH and I have picked up the pace, rehearsing in my cluttered classroom most days after school and on the weekends, with his Nashville audition for AMDA coming in less than a month. It’s enough to make your heart shake, to see this young kid pacing in front of the chalkboard, brow furrowed in concentration, on a Sunday afternoon, just off of work and still wearing his McDonald’s uniform, grease-stained but ironed with care as if he was clocking in somewhere on Wall Street; shouting with the clenched-fist rage of a repressed South African during Apartheid or two-stepping and cracking jokes with a sideways glance. We’ve chosen a monologue from Athol Fugard’s Statements and the other from the hilarious collection of David Ives’ one-acts. He’s good, and learns incredibly quickly, but I don’t know if he’s good enough. His essays could have used a lot more work, and he’s going to need a lot of financial aid. I’ve heard too many stories of Delta students getting accepted into some good schools - Ole Miss, Mississippi State or even Xavier, Cornell, MIT - but enrolling instead at local community colleges for fear of failure, their own or their parents’, financial and familial commitments that hold back far more than urge forward; or, perhaps worse, students making that leap, only to come back home shortly after with their tails tucked between their legs, wading back into those shallow, familiar waters where they feel more comfortable and safe. I hope he gets it, probably even more than he does.


See, I’d stay as late as BH needed me to, because I feel like I’m making a difference and that we, together, are accomplishing something … working towards an attainable, albeit ambitious, goal. So then, why is it so hard to drag myself into the classroom every day, when I honestly feel that I do enjoy teaching and love every one of those little fockers (no pun intended … well, maybe) - the roses, the thorns and even the weeds. Perhaps it’s because I’m not allowed to really teach. I’m taught instead (told, rather) to train; to not ask questions, to not doubt authority but rather to humbly fear and blindly follow it, to follow and not to lead, that appearance and end results are everything without attention to independent motivation or critical reason. In essence, to program ‘my kids’ in a way I am not only fundamentally opposed to, but feel is directly crippling any realistic chance they may have of personal/social progress.

Herded this way and that like sheep by inattentive shepherds, these sacrificial lambs are becoming Orwell’s incarnate ignorant masses. I, for one, am not a huge fan of our present situation, and am growing increasingly cynical toward the prospect of our collective future. Educators and parents (at what point did educators start replacing parents?) must focus on and emphasize more positive, empowering and liberating messages for the youth we interact with each day over these negative, controlling messages they are getting instead. The purpose of education should be to help students develop independent capacities for creative and critical thinking. It seems that in our public schools and other educational environments these ideas are at-best paid lip service, and at-worst ignored in a high-stakes testing arena which places the upmost value on forcing stagnant curriculum content into the brains of learners so they can score well on bastardized, I’m sorry, standardized tests.

Throw 'em in the trash, they're not even worth composting!

“Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other.” - Adam Smith

Politics, that hulking elephant in the classroom, has sat its mammoth ego on top of our most valuable resource; our children. If it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense. But dollars don't always make a damn difference. If I were to raise a family in the Delta, the question would not be public or private, it would be whether or not to send them to school at all. I’m constantly bewildered at the choices made “in their best interest”. Let’s get rid of extracurricular activities – well, everything except football and basketball. I mean, we're taking away their school we've got to give them something. Art, music, health … what good will any of those do them?? Be careful with history. There are no facts in our libraries (and there are hardly any adequate libraries), only opinions; for instance, that this nation’s own (recent?) history is imperialist and morally corrupt. Absolutely no worthwhile experiments in the labs, if you’re school is lucky enough to have one, because of the liability lawsuits can bring, and absolutely no dissecting Piglet … animal rights, of course. Nevermind the rows of pig-appendages decorating the aisles of every market south of the Mason-Dixon. Let India and China continue their heathen, communist practices; our doctor’s will at least be good democratic christians and not push the envelope enough to make the simple folk raise an eyebrow towards tradition. While you’re at it, just go ahead and cut the number of subjects a child can take to the state exam requirements … we must teach them to work, and that work is not fun. Let them be inspired on Sundays. Let’s beat the curiosity and problem solving out of them with a wooden paddle, dead lessons, worksheets and multiple-choice assessments. Band-aids don’t heal infected sores.

Where is their freedom they were promised? What about the skills necessary to equip oneself in order to be able to a) make the world a better place and b) help your fellow human beings – including your own children (for some sooner than others)? If it was just about putting food on the table, everyone would be flocking to Cuba or Venezuela and not Ellis Island. Any child who endures twelve years of ‘state education’ without gaining a decent level of literacy, math fluency, verbal fluency and a basic general knowledge of the world they’ve inherited (all of which I’ve found rare among my sixteen year-olds) should have a legitimate case in law against their school district, their State Dept. of Education and the U.S. Dept. of Education. It’s malignant child abuse to neglect their basic needs to such an extent.

Am I helping? Not really. I get frustrated, angry, and depressed (in cycles). I get by. I get overwhelmed. I withdraw from the commitment I’ve made to them, and try to embrace more selfish desires. But it’s hard to look away from a train wreck, especially once you’ve gotten to know and care for the passengers. All day long, over and over, I can forgive my kids. I can’t forgive the adults … and I’m having a hard time forgiving myself.

I'm going to make a milkshake.