Flamboyant Swashes
Flamboyant swashes; flaming crimson,
could be my face, as the flyswatter-hand
could impress such lettering upon my cheek.
so I
severed the crescent-angel of my imagination,
dashed my dreamy cursive, expunged the end;
held my breath as I curtailed the honey-alphabet.
Nun in black,
giving me grief, exacting ruler teeth, measuring
the letter of the law; curtains to poetic strength.
Who was I to think
outside the parochial box. Couldn’t she,
who dangled rosary beads,
have at least
decisively
have added,
“My! My! Isn’t that pretty! You will make a great poet
one day, but today, dear one, you must play by the rules.”
Snap! Crack! My knuckles are raw.
They meet my mom’s gaze. We laugh.
In my time, the penguins
wouldn’t dare,
but dare
one did
to
bang the elementary school kid,
his head, against the classroom door
frame. famed…defamed…sorry for him.
He probably didn’t tell
his mom and dad.
We didn’t
back then.
This was only one educator…
the rest were fairly nice. Unfair
to dice my letter, mold it, conform it.
Perhaps that is why
I
interchange cursive and printing
as I take note
of the world at large
and
the small people that live on a ledge
eyeing letters and ledgers
with eagle-eyed veracity.
Verifiably insane,
the pinch
of my pen,
in the grip of Sister Pain-in-the-Neck.
Feverish,
with fanciful letters,
alpha-betcha-soup, heterodox-ical, complexities
with outlier formatting. I
will pull out from the alphabetical wolf pack,
hungry for a feast
of flippant snippets. Do my teachers
toss in their graves? I
think not. They just lie
in a box, just so.
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