Go to college to learn
surgery, neurology,
law, medicine,
finance, teaching, and so forth.
Technical arts, maybe.
Those who truly make it
or have made it
on any level
with writing prose
or fiction
or poems
or contemporary literature
will do it out of a mixture of stubbornness, compulsion, and fire.
Past an understanding of English, school was
an arduous nightmare for me.
Pulled from the system(s)
by sudden parental death,
school was a logical waste
for me at grade 11
employment eclipsed
education
because the streets were
even worse than
the classrooms
so I worked shit
jobs
a dropout with a dream
I read voraciously
and wrote like
a madman
and after two decades
of being out in the wind
or in cars or old vans
or in apartments
or rented rooms
or shit monthly
and weekly
hotels across the country
the hard work paid off
the hard work at home
after the job had eaten my
flesh for 10 hours
but the jobs fed
the pages
and right now the rain
falls in California
and the steak and eggs
are over-easy
and rare just like
I like them cooked
and even though I'm
in a diner on my
phone
and not crazy
about this poem
I didn't write it
to be anti-education
or pro-anything
this poem
is
cautionary.