PLEASANT STREET ELEMENTARY
Pleasant Street Elementary wasn’t always so… pleasant--
manned by mannish “misses”… barren, clucking, leathery
mummies uniformed in wallpaper dresses up the sleeves
of which they tamped their precious and glistening
nose-blown hankies--
patrolling in their black, dominatrix, strait-laced, commandant
high-tops… wielding those Teddy Roosevelt big sticks…
hungrily ferreting out punishable felonies with their rooster eyes
swollen bulbous and wild behind the coke-bottle lenses
beneath their 1943 steel-penny grey schoolmarm buns--
and every year the administration cheerfully shuffled your
Old Maid deck… while you waited with the bated breath of
the doomed Russian-rouletteer as they’d croon, Go ahead…
pick a card… any card… and then deal you Cinderella’s wicked
stepmother… Huck’s Miss Watson… or Pip’s Miss Havisham…
Can you say ‘fear and loathing’?
Can you say ‘P.T.S.D.’?
Pleasant Street Elementary wasn’t always so… pleasant--
manned by mannish “misses”… barren, clucking, leathery
mummies uniformed in wallpaper dresses up the sleeves
of which they tamped their precious and glistening
nose-blown hankies--
patrolling in their black, dominatrix, strait-laced, commandant
high-tops… wielding those Teddy Roosevelt big sticks…
hungrily ferreting out punishable felonies with their rooster eyes
swollen bulbous and wild behind the coke-bottle lenses
beneath their 1943 steel-penny grey schoolmarm buns--
and every year the administration cheerfully shuffled your
Old Maid deck… while you waited with the bated breath of
the doomed Russian-rouletteer as they’d croon, Go ahead…
pick a card… any card… and then deal you Cinderella’s wicked
stepmother… Huck’s Miss Watson… or Pip’s Miss Havisham…
Can you say ‘fear and loathing’?
Can you say ‘P.T.S.D.’?
