Please, not today.

Please don't make me teach anymore today, please don't let the students come, please don't let them question my reasons, please don't let them moan when I show the essay prompt, please don't let them attack me the second they come into the room, please don't let them beg and plead and complain and say why do you even test us, anyway.

What? That already happened, eh? So, here's the thing about teaching, the thing is that you're assigned, you know, over 100 students and you take them home with you every night and you work for 8 hours at school and six more when you go home, and yet you feel like nobody else fucking gets it, that it's just you and it's just them for such a long time, even when you're at home, alone, in your blue rocking chair and sipping your iced diet green tea, they're with you, yet you never feel so alone and drowned in your work at the same time. At least when a ship goes down there are a couple of people drowning at the same time, and they can at least say--well, the ride was fun at first, you know, when they smashed the bottle of champagne on the side and we headed out--but here there are just a bunch of people screaming at you while you're drowning to--I don't know, bring them a glass of juice--but you're too busy trying to stay above water. When were you gonna get me that juice, then?

Well, then, please just let me have a free day--24 full hours squeezed in here and there. Please understand that I haven't put my clothes away for literally six weeks, because there is just no time, instead there is a pile of clean and a pile of dirty and a pile of I-can't-tell-but-it-smells-alright, please, please tell me why I've collected 180 papers to grade, so many papers, 120 tests, 120 students to tell me I haven't been subjective in the right way but the wrong way, who hold onto those points like the last petals on the last flower from a parent's funeral--as though they make some sort of difference when all is dead anyway. Please let the grading come fast and not so painful, yes, like my own death, yes like an out of body experience that forbids me to return to my own body when it's over--I'm never coming back, no! never, never coming back, ya hear?

Please let the sleep, the heavy eyes, the headache in the back, now the side, now the front of the brain stay at bay just a little longer, please make this end, please, I'll do anything, please make it stop. Please let the fireworks in my brain stop shooting like this fucking Fourth of July of anxiety that refuses to just be done already--and will there be a big show, anyway? Will there be a finale, when I realize I said to the students today: You know how when a woman's pregnant and you bet on when the baby will be born? You can bet on the day when I finally just, when I just crack, you know? And they looked at me because they couldn't see it in me, because I hide it well, but it's in there, it's in my head, it's just that someone is shooting of fireworks in the middle of the goddamned afternoon for some reason other than maybe they like the stink of sulfur. And who wouldn't? The smell like fire, like you have the power to destory or entertain depending on your mood, the smell of dusk, but only on the days where you go to bed and get to sleep in. And instead I just want to create things, morph clay and describe why I did it the way I did, into a bowl like shape, I just want to take books' authors and put them into a room together to see what happens, I just want someone to ask me why the hell did you do it that way? What were you thinking? And not have an answer, just to say that the fact that I did it was reason enough, that hey, it makes sense to me, get off me about it.