Graduating with a torn map to the life we should want, but don't....

[Lori Polachek]

This poem is a tribute to Sir Ken Robinson's, The Element- and its essential insights about the importance of nurturing students passions-

Lines                                                                                                            By Lori Polachek

Cutting one’s own offspring’s

umbilical cord is a challenge,

even for someone as powerful

as the Almighty.  Three to six

years of study are required

to notarize a deed of sale or audit

debits and credits. I couldn’t find

a college with even a one-year Major

in Motherhood. Being a middle child,

I settled for Commerce-ever determined

to close in on my brother’s two-year

head start in life. He wasn’t threatened

by me, any more than Coke is by Pepsi.

That’s how it is when you’re “the real thing”-

Too busy selling bottles, and cans-

to worry about taste tests.

Pepsi could learn a thing or two.

We all could.

Freedom is the smelly, rotten

cheese promised in grade school

for jumping through mind-numbing

Pavlovian hoops, meant to remold God’s image

into that of some well-functioning

bureaucrat. I chased thoughts

like string on a ball of yarn-

a cerebral umbilicus drawing me

across restricted lines.

Nobody noticed

as long as I towed the line.

Which I could not always do.

Jokes flew off my tongue-

like a skunk’s spray.

Medication is used today,

like trade tariffs,

to level competition,

for students attention.

Freedom is the black hole

we step into, upon liberation

from childhood- armed with a torn map

to the life we should want, but don’t.

Determined to be selected, naturally

I peed on sticks with abandon,

like I had forgotten how babies are made-

Embracing each faint pair of lines

in the bosom of its own possibility

[andrew aker]

nice poem :)