Type Dancing

Here’s two poems inspired by today’s Last Stanza Poetry Association challenge to write a poem about school starting.

SCHOOL DAZE
By David Allen 

Seventh Grade was the beginning;
The change from teacher’s pet
To the underachiever.
In elementary school I was an A-plus student.
In the seventh they had me looking at pieces
Of cardboard marked with weird-looking black ink stains.
“What do you see?” the psychologists asked.
“Cards smeared with ink,” I answered.
“No, what do you SEE?” she repeated.
“What do you see?” I responded.
Today they’d probably diagnose me as
Suffering from attention deficit disorder.
They dis-enrolled me from the advanced classes –
Latin, algebra, biology –
And put me with the average kids.
And that was okay with me,
It gave me the space to
Catch up on reading Science Fiction
And writing my own future Top Forty rock hits.
The counselor had plenty to work with trying to figure
Out what went wrong over the summer;
I had started a newspaper route, hung out with
The housing project’s juvenile delinquents,
And spent two weeks at a Salvation Army summer camp.
No one knew why I had changed.
 But the “outsider” image was being molded
And it’s lasted me to this day.
 

 
SCHOOL DAYS
By David Allen

School days, school days
Good old rotten school days
Readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmatic
Faking a cold so my Mom thinks I’m sick.
You were the girl whose braids they inked.
I was the strange kid at whom you winked,
And I wrote you poems that you never got
‘cause we were just a couple of kids.

School days, school days
Those too many rule days
Faking religion to get a note
To skip class to attend the church of the pope.
You were into dance and love songs,
I was the kid they said would go wrong.
I read Sci-fi books that drew stern looks
From teachers who said they were trash.

School days, school days
A 12-year fighting rules phase
Skipping a class to hang out in the john,
Staring out windows and stifling yawns.
You were the straight A student
I was the kid who said screw this.
I already knew more than most kids know
So, I played the outsider instead.

http://www.amazon.com/Story-So-Far-David-Allen/dp/0925062480/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397184666&sr=1-13&keywords=the+story+so+far) in paperback and Kindle formats, or by sending me $10 at:

David Allen
803 Avalon Lane
Chesterfield, IN 46017