.

There isn’t a poem
Or a piece of prose
I could write for you
That might scratch a surface
 
It’s a room full of items
Things and such
An array
I wouldn’t know where to begin
 
I could try

As a teacher I asked no more
Than for one to tell me how a color made them feel
It was met with disapproval
From a comatose sect of the older less wise bunch
 
They thought you could buy colors
And hang them on their walls
Not sit in a desk turned sideways
Slurping coke
Feeling the sting going down
 
What did I know
I was a leftover hippie girl stalled on the way to Woodstock

I wound up in a Baptist community
Where the preacher at one church unnamed
Decided and joked in his wanna be movie star ways
To back me just upside the corner
In hopes of God knows what
 
So what do I have to write about

He looked at me and sized me up quickly
I was a teacher for him
He had been my friend

A conference had been called by me
I needed help or advice concerning two wayward kids
In my classroom
 
Before I taught for him
I had worked in the city
Leaving my corporate job one afternoon
Somebody grabbed me by my eyes
There is a place just below
And a place underneath your chin
That is how he held me
And that is how he threw me to the ground
 
My boss knew of the incident
Remarking as I stood
Upon leaving his office down the road
From my house that day
He asked me if I knew why it had occurred
What my take might have been
Concerning an attempted rape
 
“Because you wouldn’t give him any.”
Deacon material
Central office didn’t have time for it
Education
Level 5 school