Recall

There I stood

Six years old and three feet tall

outside my first grade classroom

Waiting for Miss Jacobs to wrap up her thoughts about me

As she conferenced with my proud and delighted mother.

"Six years old

and her reading level is five higher

than normal!"

my first grade teacher praised of me

with enthusiasm.

"She's going to be

an author someday."

I believed it, my mother believed it.

Miss Jacobs believed it-

That I

Was going to be

A Writer

Someday.

There I stood

Ten years old and four feet tall

Waiting for my father to return

From his conference with my fourth grade teacher.

"You know," my father said, "Jenny wants to be a teacher."

"I don't see her as a teacher," Miss Smith said.

"I see her as a principal."

She had tears in her eyes,

my father told me.

She loved my stories, she read each

and every

one.

"She's going to be

an author someday,"

This is what

Miss Smith decided.

I believed it, my father believed it

Miss Smith called it-

That I

Was going to be

A Writer

Someday.

And now I am seventeen years old.

I write for myself

And for anyone who decides to latch

Onto my disaster of a mind flow.

Not that they would understand,

Of course.

Who would?

Why would anyone

Bother with words?

Unencumbered

Agile, silly words.

You don't need words

To find the cure for cancer, they tell me,

Or to discover the next highest number known to man.

You simply need those statistics,

Logical, factual numbered numerals.

Integers

Make my

Head

Sick.

So I might as well forget

The words that linger in the axis

Of my silly swiveled brain.

The whirlwind of words,

Lexis and Expressionistic art

Is for dreamers

For no-doers

Or for the selective few with a lot of luck

And a lot of words.

So unless I can muster up

All those lots of words

And all that lots of luck

It is quite tentative

That I

Will ever be

A writer

Some day.