graffito

Now there will be hell to pay,
making out a check twenty-two dollars no cents
to Satan, who lives
with a grin in high-school hallways.
Now there might be heaven to pay:
"Thanks be to the gods,
It's summer. I'm out." And you're not
a student anymore.
You go barefoot on grey concrete instead.
Satan sulks and nips at your toes
reminding you: You have to learn what you forget.

There are few windows in the school.
There are no windows in this room.
The door leads out
to the hallway,
and there are none there, either.

Only a grid of numbers
charred like brands into the walls.

"In order to get work done,"
the teacher says, in terms of physics,
"you gotta have energy."
It's eight o'clock in the morning
and someone is drinking coffee.

On a poster:
"Marcus Tullius Cicero."
Beside it, in smaller letters:
"is a penis"
handwritten.
"Vergil sucks."
Marcus Aurelius has not yet been defaced.
They say that graffiti
is a growing problem in this school.
It was in last week's paper.

You didn't do the homework—
instead you caught butterflies,
mapped stars,
slept on the roof,
dug through rocky soil,
read hieroglyphs,
cooked a meal. Now
there will be hell to pay
and diagrams darkening the whiteboard.

After reading a poem
no reaction in anyone's eyes.

Conjugate this aloud:
taste the humiliation
and dream of when, in ancient Rome,
you ancestors spoke Latin
with vulgar fluidity,
with unacademic
loose and dancing grace.

You speak English
as fluid as that,
but your teacher says double negatives are wrong
and assigns six pages
due before you die.