Should life start like this?
Going to school as the sun rises, spending
the best hours of sunshine in the classroom,
raising my hand just to ask to go pee,
denied to one girl who peed her pants,
while another girl snickered, but the rest of us didn’t
because we knew it could easily have happened to us,
shame on the teacher, starting the school day with a
bible reading and the Lord’s prayer, but not really for me,
atheist parents protesting, rightfully so,
the unity of religion and state, sitting in the hallway
during the religious itinerary and wondering what would happen
if I headed straight out that door into the sunshine to play.
Should life continue like this?
Teachers and parents bitching
that they have no life balance but sending us
high school students home anyway
with enough homework and studying
to thwart our ability to embrace the remaining
sunshine hours before supper,
not even seeing the irony of it all,
or maybe they do and are so conditioned
that they just don’t know any better.
Should life be like this?
Taking these repressive childhood and adolescent
habits into adulthood, working long hours, going to work
in the dark, returning home in the dark, climbing the economic ladder,
moving only minisculely within the broad
middle class income band, so exhausted
that only television can fill this hard-won time,
on the weekends doing meaningless housework
on spaces so rarely used, meaningless yardwork
on spaces so infrequently visited.
And for what?
To show off our financial success?
No, to actually show our failure to get it right in the beginning,
to have never questioned what we thought a successful life
might look like, or what a meaningful life could be,
to have failed to make the most of our
brief existence in an eternity of non-existence.
