When I was in college, Dr. Gold told me that if I really wanted to learn how to write, to find the impact of words, to keep my prose well honed and razor like in their precision that I had to go take a poetry class from Dr. Master.
Dr. Master was an old failed poet. I learned later that the pair were former cold warrior spies that had turned their aging, but still skilled eyes on China. An inordinate amount of Chinese and former Soviet block students were streaming in and out of their offices all the time. The pair were constantly traveling to Russia and China on school business.
I failed that poetry class. Dr. Master basically told me every Tuesday and Thursday that I sucked. He would get irrate if we handed in anything that rhymed at all. He said, “No one writes those poems anymore.”
Oh well. He’s probably dead now and I’m still here. I guess I won, right?
So in the spirit of pissing off Dr. Master one last time…
“In Between”
There is the light and there is the dark.
She lives somewhere in between.
She is made of wild sparks and cooling, hard tempered dreams.
She is my laugh.
She is my sigh.
My blues, reds and greens.
Is all hope lost?
Sometimes, yes, it seems..
Because the shine, it comes and goes.
She says she’s too tired to keep things polished and clean.
The words she speaks she always means.
But maybe she’ll shift and things will gleem — as they should be.
And so, for her, here I wait:
Dieing at the in between.
Come on, that’s at least C- work, right?
