a poem, first draft

literally all I've done all week is write. I've been working on a short story about a boy with nightmares, a close-reading paper about the use of Grendel's mother to criticize a society obsessed with wealth in "Beowulf", a poem about invisibility, and as always, a lot of e-mails. It's funny though, when you get into a routine of writing a lot of things and then you just keep wanting to write a lot more things because your creative juices get flowing and it's like there is no off button (please tell me that I'm not the only one who experiences this). So this morning, instead of taking a break from writing, I felt inspired to start another poem. It's in the very beginning stages of birth, but here it is so far! YAY ENGLISH-NERDINESS! :)

Mr. Karpan couldn’t hear, but he liked to blast loud
rock music through the radio of his red Crossfire
to feel the drum solos and touch the sound.
There was the story once of his tire,
the flat he tried to fix and a man
stopped to help and loudly asked “can you read?”,
so on a piece of scrap paper, Mr. Karpan
wrote “No, and I can’t write either” to make him leave.

He taught me the shape of my name,
how to form the letters on my fingers and make them one
single thing. He’d tell us to practice and gain
stillness, and show us to run
the letters into rhythm without a distracting jar
of up-down motion. We’d hold our wrists and try,
and move our arms in the space with far
reaching fingers to tell stories, no words and by

the middle of the year we were signing in hallways.
Then Mr. Karpan came to class
with his eyes red and swollen, said most days
the teachers here wouldn’t wave when he passed,
and he had to find the computer lab on his own,
and even the principal, in passing, stared at his shoes.
Also, the tendons in his wrist were breaking down
somehow, he needed surgery, it hurt to -

Watch, when we sat in our seats, we watched the death
of his silence and it sounded wrong, in his frenzy, the gasps
of guttural speech to escape him like that, like breath
that couldn’t be held in. Something between us passed
that no one else could understand because it wasn’t spoken.
Mr. Karpan finished and left the room, and no one asked
what to do, but we sat with our own broken

ideas of the differences between Anger and Silence,
and How Facial Expression and Body Language are Necessities of Grammar.