Poem: June 23, 2019

First Real Job

The first year of teaching can be a real
shit show- 180 days of being the unathletic
kid on the dodgeball court, 9 months of
building the ark mid-flood. And everybody
tells you that they remember their first year,
and, boy, are they happy it isn't them, but
here's some old tools you don't know how
to use, and here's some advice that isn't you.
And whose bright idea was it to put you
in charge of thirty different versions of
the most complex machines on the planet,
for which you need to write the instructions
that will result in the quiet hum of a
functioning engine. Good luck with that,
when on most days you are still figuring out
how to read the map that they said would
get you from August to May, and whoever
said. "Don't smile before Christmas," was
making some major assumptions about
your inclination to smile in the first place.
I mean, I guess it would be amazing to
flash a cool smile in front of a firing squad,
but who do you know who could pull
that off? Who even has the wherewithal
to set their jaw and leave it set when at
any minute someone could come down
the hall and peek behind the curtain, and
all the exhausted hamsters running on
all your squeaky wheels would be revealed.