Playing School by Darren Edwards

Let’s talk about education.

Let’s talk about the power of knowledge

and the desire to learn.

Let’s talk about the hundreds of thousands

of schools Oprah didn’t buy

new computers for,

or the millions of African kids

whose school house didn’t just get

a new roof because they don’t have

a school house to put it on

and how we pat ourselves on the back,

fluff our pillows and drift to sleep

thinking happily about the lesser half of these

equations.

Let’s talk about desire.

and the returning student

whose fifty plus years

have taught her more than her twenty-eight-year-old teacher

could write in a hundred books

and how she still shows up to class

because of a belief that even this young arrogant shit can show

her something new.

Let’s talk about how she shows up to class

despite sickness and shakes

despite struggles with bi-polar disorder

despite memory loss

caused by the electro shock therapy

Harvard doctors put her through  

in the sixties.

Let’s talk about the day

she suffered vision loss

and shook in a way that only those

who’ve had their concept of reality

spun on a top can understand,

the rush to the emergency room,

and how she cried as her son guided her to the car,

because all she wanted

was to learn.

And what about the single mother

reading “Good Night Moon” to her daughter

dreaming that the inner-city school

the girl will attend could get more funding

or the upper class high school quarterback

whose pockets should be filled with vending machine

change, but are filled with the pills

he needs to keep up with the pressure

of expectations and ideals thrown on him

by parents and teachers and a society that only

cherishes the individual in success or distress.

Can we talk about these things?

Or, do they slide past our fingers,

touching only briefly,

only in passing

on our way to the video store

to rent “Empire Records”

or “The Breakfast Club”

because it’s been a long week

and I need to fall into

pop culture like the oversized cushions

on my living room couch

because the walls of my skull are still

reverberating,

still vibrating,

still trembling with the image of this

woman being helped out of my class

the class where twenty kids in their twenties

listen to one kid up front pretend

his thumb can

pins the worlds knowledge

to an overhead transparency.