Becomming an English Major

not sure how i feel yet

From the time I’d blown out enough birthday candles

And I was too big to throw back

The great assumption was made

That as soon as I had one diploma in hand

I would need another to compliment it.

The bulging wallet and purse, though,

Offered no folded up roadmap of advice

Out of their own glove compartments

To aid in the decision

About what type of clothes I’d wear

For the rest of my life.

 

Outside the brick walls of the school

In a little tin shack

The girl in the yellow tank-top unhinges my jaw

But it snaps like a bear trap

When the red-bearded goliath

Presses me to point out predicate nominatives

In a sentence about Dickens.

A year later they let me inside

But the little shrew’s bloody pen

Marks up the first five pages of a notebook

I’ll never use again.

We sit in a big circle

While the parrots spit back the exact words

They just heard to protect their coveted A.

The middle-aged man with subdued flamboyancy

Who can do the Southern, female accent

Just a little too well

Let’s me wander around a white vacuum

For most of the year

Occasionally tossing me a few scraps

From the plates of Poe and Twain.

On a dim porch in the heat of July

Watching the black dog

Sniff and piss on the surrounding shrubbery

The final piston falls into place

And the engine starts sputtering and barfing up

Clouds of murky vapor.

My watering eyes focus through the haze

And I see the night sky in full glory.