These are my children, a hodgepodge
of students strewn like leaves among my classroom's skeletal desks.
Arbitrarily assorted into my care,
my students look to me
for answers about a world
hardly understood. They try,
these kids, staring straight
and unflinching down the long
bore of life in the late
20th century.
Damaged by the fall from childhood
into adolescence, they face down
a world gone crazy for the individual, yet
uniformly homogenized, a place
where gold chains and guns
create the man. They believe
in violence the way I once
held to books and family. Tomorrow is
a word gone
from their vocabularies, replaced
by a barren autumnal wildness.
The books I open for them speak
of order and ideas, the luxury
of thoughts that change humanity.
For my students, order is
the predictable curfew imposed
by routine. They reject it
like warm milk. They long
for motion and mayhem. Absent
of history and ancestry, they find
each morning a slap
into the day they'll dance
through until the night
they embrace as solitaries
in solid groups, unthinking
certain only of the chunk
of chaos their gang life creates
and holds at bay. I close
my books. I speak
to my students as friends
who'll never be. I tell them
of freedom without hope,
a world empty as November trees.