Laura C. Lippman 🔈

so bad are they with their hassles and grapples
meaningless stinginess no eye contact
no lip contact occasional prick contact
no not the good kind the steel screwdriver
inside you kind the unwary in the night kind
the bullets packed in the shed kind
the throwing animals in the air up there
with the buckets and the plates and platters
and other matters that all cascade
down to ground kind while we run around
trying to avoid the next spiky tantrum
of objects thrown point-blank at the forehead kind
out of the rain of knives mind and smiting
you straight through your searing heart

First stream-of-consciousness piece scattered into my final history AP opus, already accepted to college, so sick of high school the last thing I wanted was to write another frickin’ paper, so I scored one from a graduated senior and set myself to type whatever stuff came to mind, pad the middle where Mr. M wouldn’t see it, figured he’d be so bored with my fifty pages of drivel he’d scan the beginning and the end, his crazy eyes one brown and one blue, always bragging about his real job at the college down the road, honoring us lowly seniors with his presence, me so tired of being a perfect little thing my parents bragged about at cocktail parties so the family dentist could parrot that shit back to me while I had my mouth full of his hands and metal dams, Daddy’s good girl weekdays, out the window weekends, caught before dawn in my nightie at Spring Equinox ready to greet the dawn, but my boy’s parents heard the Peugeot leave their house at 4 and called my parents afraid we would elope, the last thing on my mind – come on – and to think my best friend’s cats were named Peugeot and Nike after our bicycles. Mr. Multicolored Irises read my non-historical ramblings, wrote notes in the margin that I didn’t have to be what Daddy said, I passed his class and doctored for years – now that Daddy’s finally dead, I write poetry.