The Third Sure Thing
February 12th, 2007Save as PDF
The Third Sure Thing
Death and taxes –
The two sure things.
But there’s another:
The exam dream,
Nature’s way of agreeing with you
That you should have studied.
There’s the one where you can’t find the room
And you meet your father
In a hallway and he says,
“Why aren’t you taking your exam?”
There’s the one where they won’t
Let you in because you haven’t
Paid your tuition bill or worse still
The one in which you simply haven’t done the work
And the questions ask you
For solutions to problems
You’re just now finding out you have.
Waking from the dream you think,
“Thank God, it’s just a dream.
Dad’s been dead since ‘81,
And I don’t have a test today.”
And then of course the acid
Starts to burn, because
You’re only half-right.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
I don’t have to like all your poems. This one doesn’t get off the ground for me. Or at least not until the last stanza, when it enters the realm of the “things aren’t as they seem” school… only half right. (The Wright brothers’ first flight lasted 12 seconds.)
But I’m still reeling from your previous dream lesson: [I had to go back and look it up] “Dung.” That one killed me and the best line for me was, “Our dreams are becoming more lifelike than our lives.” That’s how I feel, though I didn’t know it til you wrote it. That’s about dreams. That’s a keeper.
Attention webmaster: I hate smilies, but this time I clicked one and only got the word — “evil” — not a picture. So I deleted it.
February 16th, 2007 at 8:11 am
I forwarded it to my son. I didn’t get it, your e-mail, that is. Got it this morning.
- Peter