Poetry / Math Test
In the beginning
there were 1,000.
100 fell to noxious plumes of gunsmoke.
200 dropped out, couldn’t hack the bullshit curriculum,
got caught in the cage.
100 liked the crack pipe
and I really don’t blame ‘em.
Yet, 600 graduated—despite their age.
100 of them went to college;
75 couldn’t spell or act assimulated,
so they wuz forced to quit.
6 cracked books at Community C.
7 flipped burgers at Mickey D’s.
yet 12 wise men still managed
to hold a degree … highly.
Say 4 stuck out for a Master’s,
and a quarter of them became an MD,
and that single one couldn’t teach
the next 1,000—despite all their desperate pleas….
33 poked AIDS into their veins,
14 sat and stuffed their heart into a bottle of wine,
77 got busted holding up a liquor store or 7-11,
22 got dropped by a 44 or a 9.
It’s the “little” disasters that kill
all our dreams of heaven.
40 drank a 40 & got knocked up
by 40 more.
103 sling their foodstamps for half price on the street
just to score another vial,
while 29 sit around their momma’s house pokin’
the dial on the TV.
None of them will die
draped in the splendor of old age, smothered with grand kids.
So you tell me…. What does all this equal?
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..our fucked up society, that’s what!
This really puts education into a real perspective. Maybe truer than one would think. I have seen it! I have been in some of those catagories before waking up to the fact that people make their own destiny. How you come up with this list is beyond me but it really holds true.
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Wow! Powerful stuff here. I’d be interested to know where this came from. I really like what you did here with all the numbers. Kudos.
This must mean I suck at math. Seriously I do, but you tell the truth in your poem about a time when kids are pasted on to the next level of learning. Until they are 18 and no one holds responsibility for any of the economical or social disintegration that go along with it. It’s a good written poem and I wish I could answer your question at the end but it is a subtraction to what we could be in the future. Along with minus point on all of use for letting things get so bad..
The used of math as your metaphor is unique to me. I hope I came close to what you were saying. If I did not I found something anyway.
Very well done. A novel and unique way to illustrate statistics. It brings meaning and humanity to the raw numbers.
Very well done.
Write On!
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