My friend told me he wanted to be a kid again,
"To abdicate the responsibilities of adulthood,
to have nothing to worry about but toys and snack time."
I felt my molars dig into each other,
shredding unspoken words between them.
Cloy of chalk dust in the nostrils.
The teacher has eyes that watch sideways
like a shark, or Mona Lisa
even when she isn't looking.
Outside, too warm in coat, mittens, boots,
gagging on cold air, you stumble, fall, and rest,
snuggled in the fat thighs
of tree roots,
insulated from gleeful shrieks a hundred yards away.
There are no broad-backed maples in a classroom,
but there are books.
Resting in the gritty, sticky metal trough under the desktop
an open novel tugs you out of the world
of filthy rough carpets and wobbly graffiti.
Gradually others forget to pinch,
and your neighbor on the right loses interest
in embezzling your pencils.
The teacher grudgingly scratches a star on your spelling test.
You learn not to smile when you see that,
but it's golden armor the next time someone calls you fat
to remember that they couldn't spell "encyclopedia."
I learned to speak above a whisper,
to walk like I belonged to whatever place I was in,
to explode out of my eyes and challenge the stranger
to love it or lump it.
I was sitting under a tree with my friend
when he told me about going back to the paradise of four feet and under.
I sat back, smiled, and pegged a branch with a few pebbles,
and told him to grow up.