contemplation

Fire Drill

Time spent, just the two of us on the bathroom

floor

after everyone else had exited with all

the aplomb of bagpipes exhaling one

last, droning breath, (not to mention the piercing

klaxon bray that drilled burr holes in our heads

until the school secretary switched

it off), was pastoral.   Tile and water

trickling from the balky flush valve of a

no nonsense urinal not unlike the

nothingness of a Zen garden tended by

prostrate monks, our heads wreathed by tonsures of

silence, the sand and stone behind the wall

of your skull in eternal disarray

under the rake of a frenzied god, this

capricious deity that frog marched you onto

the bus each morning, anointed with Haldol,

appointed in labeled state issue raiment,

his will be done until the final bray of the

bell.