The schoolyard of forever

The schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the dragons, the Freaks The beatings against the wire fence The eyes of our mates watching Glad that they were not the victims We were beaten well and good And afterwards Followed Taunted all the way home to our homes of hell Full of more beatings In the schoolyard the bullies ruled well, and in the restrooms At the water fountains they owned us and disowned us But in our way we held Never begged for mercy We took it straight on Silently We were trained within that horror A horror that would later hold us in good stead And that came around As we grew in several ways with time The bullies gradually began to deflate, lose power Grammar school Jr. high High school We grew like odd plants Gathering nourishment Blossoming As then the bullies tried to befriend us We turned them away College Where a sun of wildness and power arrived The bullies melted entirely We became and they un-became There were new bullies The professors Who had to be taught something beyond Kant We glowed madly It was grand and easy The coeds dismayed at our gamble But we looked beyond them To a larger fight out there But when we arrived out there It was back against the fence again: New bullies Deeply entrenched Almost but not quite worthy They kept us under for decades We had to begin all over again On the streets And in small rooms of madness It lasted and lasted like that But our training within horror endured us And after so very long We outed Oblique to their tantamounts We found the tunnel at the end of the light It was a small minority victory No song of braggadocio We knew we had won very little against very little That the changing of the clock and the illusions beat everybody We clashed against the odds just for the simple sweetness of it Even now we can still see the janitor with his broom In his pinstripes and sleeping face We can still see the little girls in their curls Their hair so carefully washed and shining And the faces of the teachers Fall and folded The bells of recess The gravel on the baseball diamond The volleyball net The sun always up and out Spilling over us like the juice of a giant tangerine And Herbie Ashcroft His fists coming against us As we were trapped against the steel fence As we heard the sounds of automobiles passing but not stopping As the world went about doing what it did We asked for no mercy And we returned the next day and the next and the next The little girls so magic as they sat so upright in their seats In a room of blackboards and chalk we began badly But always with a disdain for occurence Which is still embedded Through the ringi-ng of new bells and ways Stuck with that Fixed with that: A grammar school world Even with Herbie Ashcroft dead