Rip Out The Pages, Burn The Textbook
Another poem this week, and it’s another one that I wrote for uni as well! This one is a sort of melding of the idea of personal history and history as a subject (i.e. being taught in school), with a ton of different images rolled up into one poem just for you. I hope you enjoy it!
Rip Out The Pages, Burn The TextbookHow does empty history have a hold on me?
No one has written of it, kept it, published
endless treatises on it, pinned to a revolving door
of revolving doors—there is no class on it,
the week after motte and bailey, wattle and daub—
so how?
It is I, I suppose. I must be cause, reason,
explanation, keeper of the one small history
I can lay claim to; I am the one pressing play
on the DVD, night after night, moving through
room plans (I know them better than the architect);
rather call them escape plans, battle diagrams.
The last meal I ate is a blur, but the cracks
in the walls are etched into the membrane
of my mind, and the sensation of living
in the split-moment before the voice raised,
the curtains drew, the popcorn was gathered…
I can’t escape it. Bold marker pen, written—
no, screamed onto my eyelids. Uneasy mornings
counting footsteps; I check the number of stops
before I press the big red button; count them down,
one by one, and it becomes the parent’s last resort.
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