Outdoor-Living-Room-Day

this is one of those poems when you just say something and it gets stuck in your head until you do something with it. hope you like it!

Outdoor-Living-Room-Day

today is outdoor-living-room-day, and
participation is mandatory, so everybody
grab an armchair or your loveseat
haul it out into the streets, and set it down
on the sidewalk, next to a stranger,
someone who has been your neighbor
for nearly a year, but whom you have never
spoken to, and say hello. it is 90-plus
degrees outside, so the temperature
should melt the ice before you even
have to think about breaking it.
unplug your television set and
bring the kids, let them rediscover
baseball, and kickball, and stickball
and every game that you can
possibly play with items purchased
at the local dollar store,

ladies and gentlemen, it is called
a community, and not from any
affiliation with the soviet government
of the last century. that is so last century,
yet your bunker mentality is still building
barriers instead of bridges, believing
you are only safe inside your house.
you are not safe inside your house!
there are millions of americans with
credit cards and the ability to climb
your fences, lets be realistic for
a second, i personally could purloin
all your possessions in the inside
of an hour, but i have no desire to,
except, maybe out of curiosity,
a desire to know the eyes always
peeking out from behind the blinds,
i would slip into your window like
an archeologist, unraveling the
mystery of what made you so damn
scared in the first place.

so instead, let's have a holiday,
a day of open doors, all of our
bodies and belongings strewn
across the streets, and lets stop
traffic with a celebration of
perfect strangers being perfectly
comfortable with each other.
wouldn't that be weird?
wouldn't that be wonderful?
wouldn't that be just so
easy to accomplish?
ladies and gentlemen, today
is outdoor-living-room-day,
I will see you on the sidewalks.

Children of the Glen

So, I just found out that if you set Facebook to update along with your blog, it mass-posts everything you've ever written on it. Oops. Guess its a good thing that this is still fairly new. Still, in that spirit of deluging my friend's news feeds, here's one more poem I wrote this afternoon. Its fairly self-explanatory. As always, feedback appreciated =D


Children of The Glen

i am spending my summer teaching children
to make change, in loco parentis, in place of
their parents, who wouldn't be their parents,
couldn't deal with their disabilities, so
they shuffled off their sons and their daughters,
granddaughters and grandsons, to a center
that claimed it could care for them unconditionally.
I've been working there for three weeks now, and
so far on the staff, there is only one woman and one man
who look at faces more than afflictions, and they are no
longer clinicians, but they still speak to the children directly,
in dialogue, not diagnoses, not the ABCs of Psychiatry,
that ugly alphabet of acronyms where
A is for Autism, and
B is for Bipolar,
C is for Conduct Disorder
D is for Dandy-Walker
E is for Echolalia and
F is for Fucked: Fucked if I know, Fucked if I care,
Not Otherwise Specified, See you next week.
These scribbled sheets of IEPs before me are
the decisions of doctors whose paychecks
depend on their ability to find answers that
fit neatly between the 4 axes of impairment.

i am spending my summer teaching children
who are not children, who will never have
been children. many are my age, but they
have been bounced between group home
and foster home, to the jailhouse and back again,
filling files and folders with their paper trail personalities.
I open them carefully, only to find that Philip's
last 7 years have been lost, and no one questions this.
Eric's engineer father underestimates his intelligence
by four grade levels: he doesn't belong here, but
he is polite to me, he counts himself lucky for
getting to go home on the weekends. And he is,
if only in comparison to Constance,
her grandmother is glad that she's gone, her
social worker says there will be no further contact.
A is for Abandoned and
B is for Betrayed
C is for Criminalized
D is for Drugged
E is for Emptied and
F is for the failing of the system, whose
death i document in this litany of indecencies
that I am keeping behind closed doors, because my closed fists
can do no damage to a doctor's orders.
i cannot save their souls from the pharmacies or
the licensed care specialists who couldn't care less.
I can only listen, when no one else does
I can only speak, where no one else will
i can only spend my summer teaching children
to make change.