Recess

crawling through the dusty pages of
twenty years gone by,
assignments, tests, handouts and
the random odd bits
of year after year

my school day-after-day that
I saved
like some great accomplishment or
some sick reminder
of all that transpired

background to clock watching, waiting,
that forever standstill
between pages and pages
of books, of notes and thoughts
and words, meaningless words

still visible smudges of
finger prints and stuck toner
clinging to the sides of notebooks
until I hit the old stuff,
those classic fuzzy blue Ditto duplicates
that smelled of sweet death

into the trash,
page after page as I ripped them
free: of spirals, of binder rings,
from staples and paper notebooks
with brads rusted well beyond their prime

twenty years of insanity and
sleepless nights gone,
twenty years of memories
that mean nothing but
noise in the distance,

twenty years of friends old and gone
and the few that passed away
crumpled and torn and discarded efforts
so effortlessly lost to the void
for freedom or freedom from wisdom,
a wise decision no sooner made