A Children's Masque

for the Jabberwock at Jackson State, and Kanitria

On the stage the children sing,
sliding into groups of two:
"If we waltz we will be kings."

No one really says a thing
against a claim of such dispute
as on the stage. The children sing

as we allow; we'd like to cling,
anyhow, to a corollary truth:
when we can waltz, we can be kings

(though the converse surely brings
more truth, it's much less sweet to chew).
"On the stage," the children sing

"History is a trifling thing,
conceding to our practiced tune:
if we waltz, we will be kings."

A lone conviction rings
first amidst those that accrue
upon the stage, as our children sing:
as they waltz, they look like kings.

... two months later

i'm never sure if i'm an active or a passive person. there's probably an underwhelming pseudoscientific survey that would nail me down as one or the other (also: i'm a sagitarius, i was born in the year of the dog, and a acupuncturist in beijing once told me - after looking at my tongue - that my blood was hot, and that i should avoid lamb's meat), but that would be underwhelming. in any case, i've been in a depressingly passive stalemate with this blog for what has surprisingly turned out to be two months (punctuated nicely by a ben guest phone call: "dave, you've seemed to have stopped blogging"). the whole mess has been buried under a sickly inertia, wherein every moment that i actually remember that i need to blog, or that i should blog, or that whatever thought i just had was blog-worthy is immediatly sucked into a paralytic vacuum - and the moment becomes tiring, then heavy and slow, and then it has to be forgotten. it is as if i've gotten into a horrible fight with a friend, and we are both sorry (and we both know we're both sorry), but neither one of us wants to either admit sorriness or move on, and so we stop calling each other (but still think about each other), and start to hang out with other people (after sufficient sitting around the house and half-watching tv). of course, the starting to hang out with other people thing is not really moving on, because it's an action wholly in the context of an unresolved absence. then, even when we actually have moved on in the most gradual and organic of ways, each time we see each other is an empty-space-in-the-head rememberance of how we'd always wished we'd just apologized in the first place, and that we should remember in the future to become comfortable with our own vulnerability.

anyway, i guess what i meant to say is that i've been reading a lot of books lately, and watching DVDs of scrubs and the family guy, and hanging out with margaret, instead of reflecting constantly (or even montly) on my teaching experience. i've also been really busy participating in the whole teaching experience thing, so much that the amount of things that i need to reflect upon are (a) overwhelming, and (b) undigestible in the short term. and blogging isn't the sort of self-contained action that you can just dip in and out of - at least not for me. it's a sort of linearity, and a sort of attitude, and a sort of narrative. and when you get derailed for a little bit of time, the amount that you feel you need to catch up on, and the amount that you feel any re-admission would be reductive easily eclipses the fact that you've stayed at school until 10pm for the nth time, and that it would be neat to write a little piece about that on the old blog.