Elegy / All of Our Lives

My poetry workshop assignment this week was to write an elegy:

before i tell you what

i'm going to tell you

i want you

to know

i'm cool with it:

i was laid off

i think i'm gonna teach

i said that when it happened

then i applied to revel

(i found devorah's-

that's our oldest daughter-

pictures all over

the brochure)

they gave me full scholarship

i told them

it's the only way

i could possibly do it

i'm taking three classes

the dean told me

i've been out of school

for a long time

that i've forgotten

how hard school is

and hey - you know what -

he was right

the girls don't say hello

excuse me but that's not right

but i think the biggest change

since i was there

is that y.u. has gotten affluent

everyone's got a cell phone

some people type everything

the teacher says in their lap top

while i'm sitting there going "doy"

and i was reading every word

of thousands of pages

i realized there's a way to do this

now i pick out the important parts

anyway

why don't i ever

see neil

at y.u.

he lives there

i wonder why i never see

him in the library

or on the street

getting a cookie

oh by the way

does everyone here know

that i'm dead

take it slow

aaron

BTW - All of Our Lives is a new book, which contains three of my poems. One of them is a short one about Aaron Bulman, which I think was selected over longer ones due to space and organization of topics. One of them is written under a pseudonym, but it doesn't say it's a pseudonym. It could have. I don't mind revealing which it is but it would be interesting to see if people guess. You'll have to buy the book, or borrow it, or decide if it's ethical to peruse it in a bookstore. I felt that my poem would be more powerful under a name that better fit the point of view of the piece.