all the books i was forced to read

as i sit here struggling in the

post-literary-oppression years,

i squint my eyes & try my hardest to

remember

just

one

little

itty

bitty

iota

of anything that i was forced to read

along that obligatory path of education that lead to

a reality of nothing, nowhere---

those elementary school years are a complete blank,

while those high school years bear titles

but barely a main character comes to mind,

just as the novels upon novels

pounded in between these ears in college

show nothing of substance now,

just as all the academic masturbation

found in shelves & shelves of research done by others

who no doubt found themselves swimming in the same

cesspool,

now have been obliterated into a thousand tiny

unconnected pieces,

floating like random driftwood in a mind that had been

far to bored with them the first time around,

to ever revisit them.

seems to me that the reading only began

that moment that the forcing down the throat

had ended---

certainly i had devoured what i wanted in print

when i got a glimpse of “freedom” during the summers &

those cracks of time between semesters,

but the lot of those years went wasted

in retrospect,

when it came to those pieces that the school boards had

agreed were “good” &

when it came to the ideas that the profs themselves had found

pertinent---

one wonders just how many have been completely turned off to

reading,

because of the attempt at forcing one to do so.