What Do We Know?

Oh shut up
Damn alarm clock
Five-thirty in the morning

Jesus, it's still pitch black out
No sane person gets up at this ungodly hour
I am not Mother Theresa.

What idiotic fantasy girds me for the seizure of my intellect as I
compose my cadence for "Open Court", the egregiously uncreative and
school board mandated system for mindless puppets to parrot the drivel
that identifies a bedroom as "a space occupied by a plethora of toys
and a canopy bed" and negates the reality of these children's lives.

The mattress that stirs my students' improbable dreams is shared with
three or more of his brothers -- in ceaseless conflict for a small spot
of their own -- a tiny speck of a world.

And what do we know of this world; what do I know of this world they
call home? Sometimes a tiny sliver of light breaks through when a
parent comes to school and reveals a piece of the unknown. A world
filled with the ceaseless cacophony of myriad cries and voices or the
screaming silence of ignorance and indifference.

And where did I get the narcissistic arrogance to judge the quality of
lives lived differently. Driving to school listening to the news on
NPR, I hear a reporter telling of the increased violence and murders in
the Thirty-Eighth Street gang. I look up relieved. I'm on
Thirty-Ninth.

If we didn't indulge in a little denial now and then, who could leave
the house? I'm always a page away from that scene in Bonfire of the
Vanities. You know, where he gets lost in the South Bronx and ends up
maybe hitting someone with his fancy Mercedes and he thinks maybe he
killed somebody and he's not sure and he's scared to death.

Reluctant pawns in a miasma of misplaced altruism, howling at the ties
that bind -- bind to a pattern of belief and behavior, social
forms and traits, a parallel universe where the experiments are deemed a
success even if the guinea pig dies.
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