Too many voices. Here I add my own, not knowing if I am merely an echo of the stronger scent of other writers, or if I have a scent of my own. I crave to write but instead I teach or do or in some way ignore what compels my core, telling myself I am unworthy of the honor, but wanting to speak, if only to myself. Maybe, maybe that’s the point. Author’s trying to speak to others, who put audience first, who desire to publish, never have the false lure of being heard worn off the first passionate blush of wanting to write. In the high school composition classes I teach, current theory tells me to teach students to determine the audience and write to fit the need. Embrace the voice dictated by the other. An outcome of reducing writing to rubrics, of cookie-cutter software that judges strings of words as acceptable if they use correct conventions. Meaning is lost in the garble of nonsense syllables.
If I’m honest, I can’t imagine teaching within the public system for the next 20 years. I long to expatriate myself – or is it dispatriate? I want to make my own school, to strike out under a tree and let my students talk to me. Even that idea smells of conformity, recalling ancient mentors. Though, I remind myself, did they listen more than speak? Did they quell their own voice to nurture others? Or did they mold the many voices into one?
I’m starting to see through their eyes; to see only what they think matters.Placing dollar signs on passion and creativity; making choices based on esoteric explanations when my heart says this matters; when my heart says it counts; when my heart says pursue, pursue, pursue, don’t give in to platitudes, soothing words that say you waste your time on non-essentials when the very essentialness of the goal is laying bare the souls of adolescents.What they think is in the words; what they feel is in the words; what they dream bursts free from their hearts in words: golden, glorious, streams of consciousness that create freedom as they mold reality, roll with whitewater thunder through canyons carved by words of power: “I matter, my words matter, my dreams matter, my goals become real as I etch them in the air, as they materialize in the stratosphere I KNOW what I am and what I can be.”Poems are student proclamations to declare possibilities can be real.
They are the unreality.Grey, bloated bubbles of nothing doing, no ways, and nowheres.Pop them now and run away; avoid the smears of grey that splatter as you burst they from nowhere to nowhen.
Now…the hardest place to be. It’s so easy to reach behind and caress the former, indulging my mind with what once was and might have been, maybes and if onlys; straining to see the mirage of the path not taken. What was no longer is and no longer holds possibilities.
Today is where I must stand, fully engaged in what is; as it slips into the past I can experience the exquisite joy of balancing between two eternities, letting one slip behind without regret, staying present here without worry for tomorrow. Such a thin, thin tightrope we traverse!
—————————————————-
The lace above my window frames the palest dawn
light seeping from a sky silvered with autumn’s touch;
soft cream accordian blinds capture and magnify morning,
whisper lullabies as I slide back into sleep, savoring the
warmth of thick comfortors, the crisp fall chill present
even indoors, stroking my cheek as I blush back into