After Abandoning
the machine, the teacher knows she’s feeding an industry. The teacher knows the private speech. The teacher knows she has intoxicated the reader. After the abandoning, the teacher knows it is a quarter-after-eight in the morn and it is time. It is time-for.
Experimenting with the automatic; the teacher is deliberate. The doing is abandoned. In the automatic; the teacher must exist not in a special protection or fudged result; but in chance. In un-chance. In what she cannot distinguish. Like flowers from weeds. Equally beautied.
The classroom is a disheveled laboratory; a kitchen; a hothouse; a sanitarium; a warrior-base. There are appetites. There are starlings. They must feed. They must. Feed, they must. They must bind their muscles to flush out all. They must twine their tales round their spines. They must be lyrical; they must be versed; authenticated; because what a teacher knows; what a teacher feels; what a teacher has the ability to teach is that: life is painful. Life is pained. Life is pain; save for stories –those balms to the wounds with which life burns.
© Umansky 2011
blog of poet, leah umansky 
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