College Life in Monkey Town
You’ve heard of how
wives who are beaten blue
return to hell.
I used to wonder
how one could miss
pain. Being somewhere
that denied heart and person –
can it be that pain I miss?
Trade this thorn for that?
How could I want to go back
to those rolling black waves
dotted in trees?
A beautiful prison
where I stared through
invisible cell walls,
wearing hidden shackles,
sitting in the Grass Bowl—
Dayton’s clocktower
skimmed the autumn sky—
while furtive students kept
to the bushes
making enough mistakes
for the three of us.
There were days where
poisoned lectures threading
venom in my brain touched
but numb neurons.
Saturdays I could stay
on the library’s second floor—
still silent forest—
watching ocean skies
crash against valley ants.
Students ran about below,
shielded under bookbags,
and there I was
content to sway
in the easy La-Z-Boy
and dream.
But most days weren’t
Saturday.
Most days were spent
in Solitary Confinement:
a tight little box
that sits behind the eye
where all the True Ideas hid.
No highway to betray that treasure chest
to the refuse squeezing
clear of my brain’s kissable anus.
Still, the Children of God
knew spoiled fruit on sight.
You sit in The Grill
on the cheap black cushions
eating your discount beef,
swallowing pesticide.
Entire churches swarm
the bench – buzzing youth
with twitching lips and
itching lines to debate.
God’s Hands and Feet
vie to cross blades
with this heathen, and
his funny idea that
his love life is no
one else’s stupid business.
“Why don’t you die to Flesh?”
“Why do you choose SIN?”
Why, when it was the end
and the pundits thought
we were dead by
viral hands, when I left,
did the simple marquee—
lone soldier by the highway—
melt
the stone box
where I’d been?
Golden lights,
promising only a prayer
for my journey,
held me by the hands
and kissed me gently,
telling me that difference
didn’t matter as much
as we all thought it did.