As I sit in this classroom

Listening to keys clattering

Pencils clicking

Feet tapping

Pages flipping

Shuffling feet

Creaking seat

Faint ac, or is that the heater?

Such is unknown to me

For it is all overwhelming

Things so small

Yet so impacting.



Then, from outside

Chatter of children

Wind whispering my very name

Calling me to the freedom of the outdoors

A plane overhead

Announcing its presence

Clicking of a mouse

A pencil dropping

People adjusting in their seats

Drinking water

Back to work

The tap of a foot

The shuffle of paper

Pages turning

Legs shifting positions

Another plane overhead

And all the while,

Here I wonder,

While pages are turning;

What am I learning?



- Jay M
November 22nd, 2019

Honey-flowing rivulets of jazz-beaten syncope,
Trumpets blowing smoke across the room,
‘Curveball’ Sammy hustles bass behind the bar,
Snares his songbird in a played back loop.

Harlem shufflers work the floor, breaking safe,
Clave rhythm scufflers with a New York twist,
Black keys write with borrowed brass on iv’ry walls,
Pick the lock on a swelt’ring southern riff.

I dream up lines
Philosophize
Spread a word
For the birds

The birds want
the bird feed

I swat the flies
Benchmark the binds
Stress the test
Do my best

The soul wants
what it wants

I've been too excited
About the things I learn
I've forgotten to hide it

The world is dark
The world is light
Which we define
Which we divide

Cut up and give a form

My heart is ill
I eat the pills
My mind is gone
I may be wrong

More often than I'm right

Lights in the skies
Here come aliens

While I'm on LSD

You don’t want the deck
Only a need for one
Somehow the shuffle still gets you
Warranting the luck of the draw
When the wild card is once in a life time
Yet you still bet blindly
Hoping for the forever hand
Full again but comes up empty
Find another way
If she smiled then she meant it
Ash has no density
Free from the party
I can’t get this song out of my head
The one you sang to me a Saturday ago
I’d  kiss you next year
And thereafter
Probably not

You were my Queen of Hearts
A top card to draw
My Queen of Diamonds
In the ruff
The best I ever saw
Turned out
You were just a lump of coal
And just as cold
The Ace of Spades
With a very blackened soul
You made a Joker out of me

Music is supposed to make us feel happy, so why is it that whenever I click shuffle I have to skip songs in order to not cry because they all have you in them?

Inside of the room where we smoke and draw pretty things in ink
I wrap my arm under your arm, and call our bodies into hug
I put my neck over your neck, you are the cheetah cub I am the fawn
How many rains old are you? No, how many droughts old are you?
I carry spirit sharks I've never seen inside my skinny legs. My hide is
Built of rhinoceros hearts and truth.

I have lived in webs, lived in dens, lived in bars and you. Your hair smells
Like freedom, marriage, and youth. I want to be osmosis where the cells Collide and contribute, even the physicist's are confused. What kind of Bird are you? I said what kind of bird are you?

I've been in the room with the garbage bags for a roof, dried berry bushes That Ed has eaten bare of fruit.
I want to hear you sing, the stories you carry with you from your youth. My trauma card is punched now, are you carrying the blues.

I have shuffled up, inside the Hebrew dragon gods I have never Understood, how the corduroy grows weary from the use, the cotton Threads they made are sewn and stitched well, so why do they tear on The legs I put them on, my legs are skinless, my pockets worn from Carrying things like a child whose curiosity is overused. I'm free for use, I'm yours for use.

A vast ocean swirls around,
Seagulls surround the shores.
There's plenty more,
Left unexplored,
But people are all around.
A nervous shuffle echoes,
With every step they make.
Lost in my mind, all the time,
Watching the scene displayed.
The only thing that's missing,
Are their voices and what they say,
It's nothing but that echo,
It's been rattling my brain.

**-N.C.