Carpentry

I set out to say that Poetry is useless
but could not bring myself to do it.
A good carpenter does not blame his broken table.
It is not Poetry that is incapable.



This month I have written, I think, nine poems, and most of them did not come with a great deal of planning or forethought. Consequently, none of them are very good. This one slipped out the other night. It sums up my month pretty well.

I will not ACTUALLY submit this to a grad school...

(Unless one of you thinks it's a good idea, too...)

I'm working on grad school applications, and this one says to "outline in general terms your reasons, goals, and other considerations relevant to undertaking graduate studies." I think this would do it...

A graduate education would further my knowledge of the English language, enabling me to waste more of the precious fleeting years of my life discovering that which has already been found, pleasing people who, in ten years, will likely neither remember nor care about me, echoing empty phrases and terms, learning to speak in a language of convenience. Graduate school could serve as the mortar for the cinder-block wall I am building to cement myself into my comfort zone, another layer of knowledge slapped, viscous and oozing, into the crevices of my mind, left to slowly ossify, optimally arresting all inconvenient wandering forever. A graduate education would let me stave off the inevitability of real life as well as serving as a pretend solution to the vacancy I fear.

The universe is a howling wilderness of despair. Carlyle says so. And all of us upper-middle-class yuppies have got to find some sort of cocoon to help us pretend that it isn’t. Some prefer a white picket fence and a hideous beast of a mortgage—I choose grad school. There’s this gap, see, this chasm that no one remembers to tell children about as they’re growing up and obsessed with high school and moving on to college. And it’s not until sometime—oh, maybe the summer of sophomore year—that the truth kicks in and our minds begin to spin the silk that is meant to serve as the parachute against the bitter winds of that cold, cruel May day when we throw our caps in the air and, with them, every link to the carefree, dependent past. I’m well aware that grad school will just give me two more years of that artificial scholastic co-dependency, but every little bit counts, right? And from there, it’s only another forty years or so til Social Security kicks in…sooner if I move to Sweden.

Say, does your graduate school have a program in Swedish studies?

Of course, I know this doesn’t apply to pre-med kids. But that is because they are all zombies.