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.