Who grows up like their parents expect

Now-a-days?

Divorce when I was three

Marriage when I was four

Divorce when I was eight.

Maybe I didn’t grow up in the slums

Bad as it could be

But my family barely hovered above

The poverty line.

A single mom with three,

No food stamps, no welfare

And two brothers who beat up their little sister.

But I found solace.

Not in the number crunching

Or the  after school care

But in a world where there was no

“Couldn’t”.

I grew up around morals that

Books and stories taught me.

I read between the lines for sport

And bathed in symbolism.

I want to teach.

To hold books and poems out to students

And ask what they see in it.

What does your life make you see?

And I never want to go back to tangoing

With the poverty line

With Depression and Never-Good-Enough.

I’ve gazed at colleges and educators since I was knee high

And I wanted to be the fun professor that my brother

Told stories about.

The literature professor who talked in circles

But maybe made the world

Look a little different.

The professor that parents told their children about.

I question how I even breathed without Shakespeare and Steinbeck

And maybe I’m wearing hyperbole on my sleeves

But that’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

I’m still dancing a dangerous dance with poverty and poor.

I don’t expect someone to pick me up like Pip

And tell me I have

Great Expectations.

I will work all day and all night

To clutch a degree in my hand

Up until people say

“Good morning Dr. Makowski”.

Until I’ve got red pen scars from grading essays

And lectures run through me like nerve signals.

I will ask “And what would you like to drink”

So many times I can recite every drink in the place

So that one day I can ask

“And how does Poe’s use of alliteration further his imagery?”

And get blank confused stares in response.