Middle School Poems part 1
Metamorphosis
They arrive like starfish
Slowly, creeping, with tiny suction cups.
The lights turn on automatically.
Emboldened, and as hamsters
They scurry towards their journals
Trapping them with newly minted talons,
Before flying to their chairs.
“Bears”, they growl,
“We’re bears, so don’t bother us.”
Industrial Rock
Is pretty easy to play
It involves throbbing away
At one chord (E is the easiest)
And screaming the name
Of a student in the room
Over and over again
For the second verse
Sing the same in a light falsetto
Then slow it down and whisper
Make fish lips
When you are standing sideways
For the finish
And pretend
You are the Oracle of Delphi
Martin Luther King Day
Today 120 7th graders made dream catchers
Brown string, grapevines, feathers, beads
David wore his rubber gloves
Because the string was toxic.
Brittany has straightened her hair
She is tired of my comments.
The dream catcher debris is everywhere
Larry, the custodian,
Who is not happy anyway,
Is less happy than ever
Has been apologized to.
There was a note on Roberta’s pile
It said,
“Roberta, you are palpable”
This is a vocab word she likes.
Tomorrow we finish the dream catchers
And do our “I had a dream” speeches
Literary Magazine Disturbed
“Is this an E”?
She said strumming
Her first finger somewhere
In the middle of the fret board
Over and over again.
Do we have an amp in here?
The typing stopped
Guitar eyes opened
“Tune this,” Sarah says, handing me the guitar.
It has been dropped a lot
The strings are rusty
There is dust under the bridge
“Give me that,” says Tas
and taking the grey shattered shell
She begins to play
Miraculously
And we sing,
Little voices, and harmony
With the lyrics we found on Google
Bug Day
Today we got jars and caught insects.
Bees, grasshoppers, dragon flies
Put them in clear orange
Pill containers from CVS and Tupperware
Lined up on the window sill
98 jars on the wall
Buzzing and hopping
We observed them, and drew them
Learned interesting anatomy vocabulary
We could use for their insect monster stories,
And released them 8th period
Before they died
Before they escaped
Before we were denounced by Jenna
(Sensitive student from Wisconsin)
Maeve Part 9
Maeve surfs in English Class
She waits patiently for a wave
Feet dangling, no pencil
And catches the conversation,
She’s up
Carving through the popular girls
I’m not listening, she insists
With her pink binder, and braces
I’m about the candy
When I was sick once
It made me better
Like wax on a board
Only extreme surfers
Can surf a classroom
Damon
Damon is here, writing
On the computer just behind me,
In his red sweat shirt
Lately, when he talks
I get dizzy.
Right now I know he is trying to lure me in,
He wants another Snickers
Snickers are not allowed in here.
Students with snickers = broken keyboards
Still he persists
He is writing,
Leveraging randomness
Hoping that we will be awed
Into confusion
His ultimate goal, we now realize
Is anarchy in the 7th grade.
Oh no he got me
He is talking again, hovering closer.
Tas
For a year
She had me convinced
For a year
I thought she was nice-quiet-studious
She joined the literary magazine
The year all the smart girls
Sat quietly
Typing poems about springtime.
She was in the 6th grade
Even quieter, with her little new friend
They rhymed couplets
Couldn’t stop
Sky, fly, pie, good-bye
But
Now
She lives in a cage
And eats nothing but boys
And hangs around with Caitlin
And spells her name with a “Z” like the devil
Brittany
She is quiet
With an explosion of wonderful red hair
She lives in a loud house
And works really hard
“Relax,” we say
No use,
Gotta keep working
Work is good
No time to rest
Make the outline
One more draft
Some day
We will all work for her
“Relax,” we’ll say
No use
Ben
Rachel couldn’t trust him with the glue
When they were supposed to be
Working on the Basilica Julia
He would glue his hands together
He spent a lot of his time building the fun box
Each day he would rebuild it
With any excess little pieces of scrap cardboard
Kyle
We have noticed
That Kyle’s bad behavior
Started about the same time
That the end of his eyebrows
Started to curl up
This theory is not bullet proof however.
Rachel has gone on record
As saying,
That they were always like that.
However,
Rachel has an “almost stitches” scar
Which Kyle gave her with a pogo stick.
Since significant others cannot testify
We are sticking to our original theory
School Play, The Wizard of Oz
Carly did not show up again for practice
The lion was there, and the tin man,
But when the tree scene was called,
No Carly.
And this was the third time.
The directors convened
Unacceptable, they decided.
There was a meeting in the lunch room
You’re done,
She was told dryly.
Turn in your branches.
Carly, only briefly confused, rose
“I am an actress!” she insisted.
“I am a tree!”
Face red, stamping feet, arms waving
“And I don’t have an attitude!”
Phones began ringing
Parents and lawyers mobilized
Guidance notified
Cast on full alert
The new trees, silent
Nap
The weeping willow
Languid and slow
Hangs over me
Whispering peacefully
I want to sleep
But the 7th grade voices are chanting
Me, me, cookies and Uggs
I want to see trout
Watch them swim away
Curl up with my pillow
With chamomile
These are poems written during after school literary club 2009 - 2013
