WRITE A FIVE PAGE ANALYSIS

In my Tennessee

small-town career,

I gave everything I

had to my students.

They were so young!

Their mental database was

a virtual encyclopedia with

a million blank pages, and

their guts hungry vacuums!

They had nothing

to think about, their think

machines not yet broken in.

My job was Knight

in shining spaceship,

to take those babies where

no babies had gone before!

Shakespeare's Twilight Zone,

Middle Earth, Wasteland

adventures so now they saw

the well is deeper, the sky

is higher, and that hot-rod

in the parking lot is a pile

of rust waiting to happen.

“Look around, I’d say”

all these friends you’ve

known since that green

bathtub when you were

two years old will fade

and disappear except

for one sparkling closet

inside your bloody brainbox

where a handful of blue

neurons hang on to them

with white knuckles.

And ten years from now,

when nothing is the same,

You’ll sit with someone new

and talk of Frodo, Macbeth

or Eliot from first period, and

realize there is no difference

between front-row Sasha,

beautiful goth in black, now

dead in her pickup and

that drowned Phoenician

sailor with pearls for eyes

lying rag-doll in the corner.