Other boys snickered at my books
and the way I carried Thoreau in the halls
to cover my eggplant face or to distract my pillbug eyes
from what they saw, both inner and outer.
I answered the questions the Misses put to me
about Du Bois, angles, and prepositional phrases.
Boys like Allen Bradley hated
my guts. At P.E. they roared
as they pelted me with basketballs
I never had a prayer of catching.
It was a new kind of revelation
that wasn't included in the curriculum.
School was okay, though, and mostly
my classes -- even the bad ones -- were a heaven
away from disappointment and being useless,
from a father's belly shouts
as if the sky were breaking in the preamble
to a hailstorm, the thunder before the lightning
and the great flash as it fell.
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