Jeffry Michael Jensen

New School in All the Right Places

For the new year, I need to learn all I can about school knots.
I cut corners on German and geometry—next stop looney Latin.
Teachers like to take stabs at cornering all my best efforts,
and I hate it when the galaxy takes my favorite seat.
The backrow has always been my domain for many moons.
An alumni bear has been posted at the homeroom door.
A tennis coach has calm hands and lousy taste in shoes.
I’m the lefty on the court who keeps on giving.
Mom bought a native rug and basket for Heritage Day.
I employ silliness to shrink the world into a more manageable size.
I keep an assortment of smirks on the bread shelf.
A red nose girl stands near the saxophone gulf splashing
and comes across as polymorphous and as abstract as a Pollack.
The marching band gods have no argument for a big eggroll pinched and dusted.
American satellites approach the dawn trimmed and blinking.
I never reach the semicolon of a thought and all the discrepancies
in between are pushed into a black hole orbit—smelled of a plucked astronaut.
Comma this and comma that all the way to water drenching
as I snake a pipe spelled from smudge to bloody smudge.
I count errors as my best backhand feature at match point.
Bumping had to happen eventually among multi-generational nerds
that congregate near frozen lakes or contaminated rivers.
No sun on Saturday, I wear my ten-gallon cowboy hat to cut the lawn.
I bite into a Sousa march as a red nose girl bleeds onto my canvas.
On Monday, a clairvoyance class draws a crowd.
Most delusional ceremonies trigger bursts of social superstition.
During second period, Mrs. Hopkins has taken on the color of Dostoevsky.
All the indulgent school district masks take insomnia to a new level.
By the end of the day, I was still hungry for a red nose girl’s heavy eyebrows.
I continued to have trouble hitting spin shots during away matches
and not going crinkled to the fight song core.
By my senior year, my inquisitive stare had gone too chummy by half
and a red nose girl grew luscious in all the right places.