This dismal, apocalyptic-looking
Monday morning the middle schooler
in my head tells me I wanna go home,
and I remind it that it sort of is home
and that this is its school home
when it’s not at its first home.
Just think, how many people
have two homes?
There’s no better place to be
than at a school, I tell it.
I think I’ll sing a song about
how lovely school is. Here it comes,
the school song, I say.
Don’t you dare sing a song, it says.
No, I think I will.
How about just a little one, and it starts
school is the best. How dare you, it says.
Oh, I dare. You better believe I dare.
I dared the time I sang
the walking down the hall song,
just yesterday,
and many years ago,
when I officially became a serious poet,
I committed myself to singing songs
and writing poems, a practice
that eventually earned me an MFA.
I dared when at 6 I went to the basement
with a cassette recorder and a Billy Ocean
album and practiced singing Ocean’s
“Caribbean Queen” until my natural
goat-sounding baritone and soulful
blues intonations literally turned me
into a version of Billy.
Let me remind you I was singing
“Thinkin About Your Body”
by Bobby McFerrin on the chairlift
at Pat’s Peak long before you were
even conceived of, I say.
I don’t get why it has such a problem
with me singing, why offering up a little
levity to an otherwise muted, flat
and overly monochromatic thoughtscape,
isn’t embraced like a fountain of chocolate.
I tell it everything we say and think
is a song, is a kind of crying,
is a kind of sad question that becomes
more beautiful the less you try to answer it.
But it doesn’t like that analysis.
No it’s not, and you’re decrepit and ancient,
it says. I think it’s time for the ancient song,
I say, and it yells no, please!
like I’m torturing it or threatening to harm
a member of its family. I tell it my father
played guitar and sang to me
while I was still wetting the bed,
and a couple of professional musicians
once befriended and sang with me
in the hospital in high school
while I was healing from some mental
health problems. Those like my father,
who don’t or won’t sing
when it’s a part of their nature
eventually either die from loneliness
or by suicide. Then again, there are times
you shouldn’t sing,
like when you’ve lost your voice
due to a cold, I say. Singing is a third
kind of home, in fact, and maybe
it deserves a spot as the original home,
since without it, nothing gets made.
I tell it the first time I remember singing
it was in third grade and the song was
“Mama Paquita,” a Brazilian folk song
about about a carnival and some fruit
and a baby and stuff. That’s good,
now will you please zip it? I asked nicely,
it says. I would, but I fear my entire
existence would cease to be if I did that.
Yeah exactly, it says. Ignoring the cruelty
of that response, I tell it if I stopped
singing each time I felt the call to sing
about every unwanted thing in my path
I wouldn’t be here to teach it
about how to take it easy and let go
into the obstacle until the obstacle
ceased to be, and that in fact,
had I not done that at some point,
it never would have developed speech.
