Go to college to learn

surgery, neurology,

law, medicine,

finance, teaching, and so forth.

Technical arts, maybe.

Those who truly make it

or have made it

on any level

with writing prose

or fiction

or poems

or contemporary literature

will do it out of a mixture of stubbornness, compulsion, and fire.

Past an understanding of English, school was

an arduous nightmare for me.

Pulled from the system(s)

by sudden parental death,

school was a logical waste

for me at grade 11

employment eclipsed

education

because the streets were

even worse than

the classrooms

so I worked shit

jobs

a dropout with a dream

I read voraciously

and wrote like

a madman

and after two decades

of being out in the wind

or in cars or old vans

or in apartments

or rented rooms

or shit monthly

and weekly

hotels across the country

the hard work paid off

the hard work at home

after the job had eaten my

flesh for 10 hours

but the jobs fed

the pages

and right now the rain

falls in California

and the steak and eggs

are over-easy

and rare just like

I like them cooked

and even though I'm

in a diner on my

phone

and not crazy

about this poem

I didn't write it

to be anti-education

or pro-anything

this poem

is

cautionary.