Parasite

When you are young
and unschooled in the future
you can't tell the difference
between your ass and the globe.

Only the bravest of you
can cast out your anchor
and say this is home. That
is risk when you are young.

It's much easier
to exersize a boundless
expectation, not to contain
your person to a place
and to reason.

Sometime in May, 1957,
Allen Evry, teacher of art stood
on the Wheaton High School stage
and announced that all the students
should get to know me, that
some day I would be as
famous as Van Gogh.

Thus was born a tiny parasite
which grew in my heart and still
whispers under layers of
fatted misstep.

Three years after
the thing was born, Allen Evry
retired as teacher of art,
left for the North Carolina swamp,
and wouldn't say goodbye.