However, there IS something I hate, and I feel if I don’t express my true feelings about it I will melt down like Chernobyl.   So here it is…for all the world to know:

I HATE YOU, BREAST CANCER.

I hate you for every moment you’ve stolen from me. I hate that you’ve robbed me of peace of mind, and that every day for the rest of my life I will be looking over my shoulder (and at my breasts), terrified that I will see you looming there. I hate what you’ve put my family and friends through; for the scars you’ve left on my body and soul.

I hate you, breast cancer, for the lives you snuff out every day with your merciless, indiscriminate scythe of pain and destruction. I hate you for taking mommies, and wives, and sisters and aunts and daughters. And friends.

The Cherry Picker

Muffling muffled muffle

pressing down

pressing down

pressing down into the pit

into my abyss

into my inner aquifer of despair

The room…spinning

doors closing

voices in the hall

What’s happening here?

(wait!) (NO)

Reclining into nothingness

vacant and removed

(fuckhole) recipient

Numbness, disengaged

a vapor,

stained.

gaspinggrasping

penetralia.

My nieces attend public school in Fort Worth, Texas.  Unfortunately, Texas ranks below average in performance, and in the bottom 15% of national high school graduation rates and per pupil education funding.  What that means is that without even needing to step foot into an actual classroom my nieces started off their education career with the odds stacked against them.

Texas Student Funding:

The National Education Association reports that during the 2009-2010 school year Texas ranked 37th out of 50 states in student funding, spending approximately $9200 per pupil, which is $1300 less than the national average.  Just ten short years ago, Texas was ranked 25th in student funding.

Texas Student Graduation Rate:

CQ Press, a nonpartisan publisher of political and policy information, and which drew its data from the National Education Association and the National Center for Education Statistics, reports that in 2008 Texas ranked 42nd in high school graduation.  And in 2009? We came in at 43rd.

Texas Math and Science Rankings:

The Science and Engineering Readiness Index (SERI), an index developed by the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics, and which measures high school student performance in physics and calculus, ranks Texas 31st out of 50 states.  Clearly, Texas schools are not preparing students for science, technology or engineering.  And consider this: the U.S. ranked 25th out of 34 countries in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, a study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development and which measures education standards worldwide; this means Texas students are in the bottom performing 38% of a country performing in the bottom 26% of the world. Ugh.

Force-fed Religion:

So, now, why am I mad? As if the above rankings aren’t enough fuel for my ire, I have seen time and time again Christian religious preferences inserted into a public school curriculum.  Okay, yes, this IS Texas…Republican, conservative, predominately Christian.  However, last I checked, religion could be introduced as subject matter only if presented in an objective manner. To assign students homework that includes statements such as “As Christians we…” is, well…it’s not objective, is it? What about the Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists, not to mention the Atheists?  How are their religious and spiritual views being represented? Apparently, since our kids aren’t getting a quality education we must think they’re too dumb to notice an overtly religious statement sneaking its way into an elementary reading assignment.

I’m also distressed that teachers seem to have given up on imaginative approaches to finding solutions.  Instead of using creative ways to handle noisy classes and incomplete homework assignments, the children at my nieces’ school have recess time taken away.  At an age when physical activity is of the highest priority these teachers are depriving their students what they need the very most: time to play.  Not only is it an ignorant response (come on, everyone knows we’re dealing with astronomical obesity rates in this country), it’s also fueled by what I perceive as sadism; teachers gleefully declaring “that’s 2 minutes off of your recess time” and “that’s another 2 minutes…” Do adults really need to exert their authority over children through power trips like this?  What message do we give our children when we require them to sit like quiet little mice for 7 hours a day, and then take away their 15 minutes of play time, making them sit still and quiet through those precious few moments of recess?

Based on Texas’s below average per pupil funding, the performance of Texas schools, and the punitive approach so readily adopted by those in charge it seems to me to be obvious that Texas children are being given this message: shut up, don’t question authority, and do as you’re told to do.

Isn’t tha,t after all, what makes good little worker-bees?

In the gloomy morning hours
without light
from the interrupted sleep
of the night
I sit in my chair
a head of shambled hair
my sleepy-eyed appearance
quite a fright

No more deep
deep sleep
for me tonight;

No more sleep
deep deep relief
tonight!

“Why can’t you sleep now?”,
one might ask.
Sleep is a sublime and
happy task
Yet I tumble and I toss
while feeling hope is lost
I’m dancing all alone,
an antimasque.

Ahhh….the coffee
coffee coffee in my cup
those silly little grains
now run amok
they’re racing through my veins
like tiny caffeine trains
as I slip slurp
slurp sip them up.

No more dreams
no more scenes
no more sleep
sleep sleep for me tonight

No more deep deep
deep relief tonight.

a moth phalaenopsis

awakened last night

Silent Watchers, hunched in grey and white,
whose postures speak to me of judgment
and unmouthed secrecies,
line the river walk, anonymous;
with dagger-shaped bills angled protuberantly toward me
in haunting quietude.

Two weepy seeping blood-shot shadows

crusted glassy wounded eyes

slight shoulders, slumped in fever and defeat

listless arms hang like a frown

Looking looking….see how sick am I?

Tear slips, unannounced, fringed lash wetness

illness here,

pooling on the blue bruise shadow.

Ghost of a Ghost

(farewell)
Specter (daisy)
dropped near the cemetery gate
expected to take root and show
thoughtographic phenomena
Belmez faces
conjured Nensha apparition

And this? And this…
desecrated grave
this…soiled spot teems
with maggots

(thought)
blind and mindless,
crawling into my abyss
my nothingness
like claw-white phantoms
squirming atop
burial mounds of memory

(farewell)
My faded tombstone,
overgrown with weeds,
now reads:
“Here a half-beaten skeleton
lies”

The tree’s bare branches

announce the winter solstice

in stark silhouette

Disjointed
a disassembled heap
of haphazard angles;
of sullied tops and bottoms

Dismembered at the proximal ends,
appendicular refuse
lack their axial articulation

Traversed transverse planes
of invalidated realness
circumducted arms scratching heads
torsos jerking up and forward at the hip joints

Whose phantom prime movers,
lacking synergists,
agonize
antagonize
flex themselves
into nothings

Vacant orbicularis orbis
vacant orbicularis occuli
vacant, abandoned… hole

Forgotten rotten corpse
see It’s styloid process protruding from the bone pile,
disconnected at the wrist?

waving waving waving: there’s a person inside here

Rouge It up
whore-like, (if you want)
It’s blushing
a painted lady
naked amongst
pigments of imagination
and discarded diarthrotic joints

Empty integument,
(mostly) superficial tissue
and myofascial dysfunction

Inverted soul,
in eccentric contraction,
index-knuckles It’s sternal notch:
ventral aspect on alert!
must hide anxiety
must hide
must

Wide-eyed existence recall
hobbled from within
paralyzed
smiling the perfect lipstick
the hinge joints aren’t hinging well
but It’s fashionably accessorized
(It’s shoes match It’s handbag/everyone says so)