Poverty and poetry
so much history together,
step and stumble,
scholarship with homelessness
though all is not 4.0 — a cement mattress,
a dumpster breakfast and pee in a bucket.
Listen-up you 4.0s
Poverty-poetry words share life,
examine understandings
and summarize the essence.
Rocky wrestled community college algebra to the mat:
the sums of cubics and linears, binomials, quadratics.
…to the mat with ‘knowns and unknowns,
unknown knowns and known unknowns,’
“Was that Cheney or Rumsfeld?
Whichever, families were killed in Iraq.”
Pride quickens excitement:
“I got ‘A’, 4.0 and the instructor asked,
‘What did we learn in his class?’
Most wrote about equations/solutions. I wrote,
“Heart and desire overcome age and homelessness.”
Sometimes the poet needs only one line.
Sometimes the homeless….