13x13, Day 5

make, want, when, light, snow, some, cake, from, their, there, leave, grow, relax

make you a bet what I
want and what you want
when night follows
light with shadows across
snow never hail or
some kind of cold
cake smearing
from your mother or
their mother as long as
there is cake we want
leave to be loved and
grow wings we can
relax under


but anyway I feel sadness in this testing and new processes for success climate in schools where who knows if what I can do is raise test scores? I thought the purpose of artists in residence was for kids to see another way to see the world, another way of being, somebody with a passion for something other than rubriks and spelling competencies, someone in my case who doesn't much give a passel what grades you're good for, what portion of the raised wasl scores you have proudly plugged away to earn for teacher and primarily principal to keep her job. I thought what I was good for in a school was a little charge of an undiscovered outside world, the fact there are always undiscovered outside worlds and all you have to do is look out there, all you have to do is live and open yourself to possibilities you have keys to, not teacher, not schoolbook, not laptop or tool. You. Inside that vast mind that everybody is so afraid you'll discover on your own and flee into so you won't buy video games, cell phones, gap jeans but lean into your dreams and into the future you can oh still and yet create.

how much of a future do I have as a writer in the schools? I mean if I don't collaborate unto cooperate unto plough under my own fields and become a member of the borg, another set of feelers touching feelers all of us getting our instructions from the queen who is the only one of us fully sexed and sentient. how sad and wasteful.

I don't feel so much used up as ill used and poorly understood. but it is not the misunderstanding of me that daunts me and makes me crabby, what I dislike unto loathe is the removal of the child from the education, the removal of education from the school, the removal of teacher even for children not disposed to do well with people. set them in front of screens at home and that will be the same and oh dear what is this future going to look like even as I yada yada about disappearing into one's own dream. See I don't much believe one's own dream can emerge from a mass produced anything, even book. Perhaps time alone under stars in a (pervert free) night field would do as much for a child as I can.

and then there's my developmental stage in which I feel uninspired to nurture teachers, administrators, even children. I have little inclination to accomodate. I never much liked the real feel of real public schools though I like many public school teachers and kids. What is it I bring that I can articulate so they can say yea or nay and stop with the prodding of my offering into distorted shapes not so conducive to my communicating what it is that makes it worth anyone's time that I'm there taking time and money from what else they could be doing in classes. I am in danger of waxing nostalgic for the days when there were unworn down un threatened teachers who got what I brought asked for it and thanked me when we were done and kids lifted pens, pencils, crayons and wrote/drew/enthused/woke up/questioned/thrived on a moment's brush with something in themselves that sparkled dazzlingly - and we all saw it, recognized it, prized it, wanted more and more of it. It, babies, is what I offer and what schools don't so much want anymore as it distracts from writers workshop which works so wondrously well with writer testing within the comfortingly uniformly shaped grid of lockstep expectation and realization and I am being unfair here and mean and am guilty of oversimplification but mostly I am bruised and sad and disappointed and not so very driven to fight anyone. we watch as our country, pawn of commerce, descends to third world status, the rich unimaginably towering over the rest of us who toil in shadow and live those lives of quiet desperation while infrastructure collapses and so many toto's tug at the curtain we ignore them and lie under our thinning blankets and mutter our impotent rage into pillows crowded with kapok and dustmites. Can we be stirred by language like Melville's? Bishop's? I say yes, but cautiously. I can be, am stirred by stories, by poems, and believe as my necklace says that reading and writing can save your life, also that reading and writing can be a life. I believe these things even as I feel sad this is not what schools want me to deliver. It's all deliverables, baby.