By Boyd Bauman
So DIY
in these abbreviated times,
cold winter weather relayed
through crisp Chrome connections,
students and staff in individual solidarity
scrolling text, X, FB, SC,
html, Gmail, usd.org,
via AT & T,
Xfinity,
T-Mobile,
refresh, refresh,
praying for that freshly generated
AI message.
Oh, but I miss that communal half circle
the night before
around the TV’s sacred glow,
gratification delayed as the ABC crawl
of schools scrolled slowly
across the bottom,
rapture almost religious
when the miracle occurred,
agnostics waiting to confirm
upon second coming.
And when I was but a green teacher,
my school still nurtured a calling tree
from which a cheery chirp
from our department chair
instructed me to plant myself
and stay rooted all day,
snow days like oxygen
to an educator’s respiratory system,
and I donned my crown
to issue the proclamation
to the next on the list,
from my perch
to germinate joy
down the branches:
listen to it bud,
hear it flower.
Façade
By Boyd Bauman
Before first bell in the high school library,
I walk the stacks to separate couples making out.
Yes, yes, I know, the blossom of young love,
live and let live and all that,
but I’ve got a family to feed, my life ordered
as the Dewey Decimal System.
One boy sees me coming out the corner
of his eye, breaks off the embrace,
pulls a book off the 720 section
and pretends to peruse it.
He’s a white male,
the type Dewey classified extensively,
so he extends the performance,
inquires if I’ve other sources to recommend
for his essay on architecture.
What a skill is façade,
how it serves each successive generation:
from fake it until you make it
to fake it until you fake out
more followers,
thoughts I muse upon that evening
as I follow the trail of commuters
in flight to the suburbs,
row upon row of perfect houses
housing perfect couples
where the fiction is
no one is breaking up,
though good sources say it’s ages
since anyone’s made out
in earnest.
Boyd Bauman grew up on a small ranch south of Bern, Kansas, his dad the storyteller and mom the family scribe. His books of poetry are Cleave and Scheherazade Plays the Chestnut Tree Café. After stints in New York, Colorado, Alaska, Japan, and Vietnam, Boyd now is a librarian and writer in Kansas City. Visit at boydbauman.weebly.com.
