Teacher showed me how to fix my poems
by trying to fix me.
Feeling my pink nipples and comparing them to Lewanda’s blue one’s.
Lewanda didn’t enjoy it either, he said.
But eventually, you get used to it.
Interview. Yes but please,
Stop it
As myselves shrink themselves up and recoil into another sad creature.
You’ll finish the interview for me?
You tell me to stop crying?
I am not a big baby, please don’t call me that.
You are like those bullies at school and yet you are an authority?
Don’t worry about my grade?
All I learned is this:
I can barely think with all the hashish you fed me,
telling me I needed to relax.
What about my sanity, you fat hippie Boulder poser?
You dull Berrigan wannabee…
I forgot my questions for you that day.
These are my questions now.
I ask them over and over again:
You say I will forget
sixteen years later?
I didn’t forget for all the glory…
that dear god didn’t punish you enough.
Only my friend Charlie who accosted you on the street saved my soul.
(Thank some higher force for that one kind act in my life.
He said you looked scared like a little stuffed, shrimp, you spineless weasel,
as he lifted you by the collar in front of students on the street.)
And where was your beloved wife, Joanna, of many years?
Did you bury her yet?
You say she got old and tubby?
You want to put her in a box I wish to inhabit instead:
dead thing away from your shifty memory.
I hope you die of drought in Sedona.
Your sabbatical siesta plagues me.
Your soul-less poetry has always bored me.
I hope more than anything
that god (wherever he’s hiding) knocks your lights out.