i’m fucking butthurt about batman and red hood so i wrote a quick poem

Willful boy who spat at risk

where is your father now?

His fingers hooked under the back of your collar and he ripped you from

the clutches of the alley to swathe you in the black comfort

of his arms.

 

Willful boy who was never frightened enough

were you scared at the end?

You grit your teeth when the red of your uniform drank the red of your face, and the crowbar

shattered your developing bones

with every swing.

 

Willful boy who picked yourself up from the vacuous chill and cried

who is your father now?

The man who stands before you now is not the man who loved you

but one lost to his own grief by a sable mark over the family

that was never yours to claim.

The curve of your body wasn’t made for mine.

Your hipbones dip and peak and bruise against my legs—

a reminder that God prefers us to stay on the platonic side of intimacy.

But I haven’t been to church in seven years

the only maxim I practice is love your neighbor as you would love yourself

and let me tell you

you are one lucky neighbor

because I’ve loved myself every night since I learned to lock the door.

i waffled on sharing this on tumblr because it was partially a personal project and partially a project for school, but i figured if i can post it in a public place for blogspot, i am comfortable posting it here, too

the assignment was, essentially, to “collaborate” with a dead author in whatever way we saw fit—considering the recent death of my dad, and the fact that he was a published poet in his lifetime, i thought this was a fitting and useful way to force myself to deal with the part of him that i had forgotten because of some stuff that happened since my parents got divorced

with that in mind, i decided to take one of his published poems and juxtapose it with some of the snippets of advice or reassurances he would send me over the years, which were really poetic in and of themselves, and i put it all over a picture of him from the 80s that i felt best represented the person he’s always been, and the person i would like to remember him as

graphically it was all thrown together pretty quickly, but the point of the project was just to think about how to remix writing with something personal and this is what i decided to do

(hot for teacher, 5/?)

Now, you’ve been wrong before.

There was that time that you got into a citation argument with one of your students and, as it turned out, she was right and you were dead wrong after a brief and flustered consultation with the MLA handbook. You blamed it on learning a different system, but deep down, you knew that there’s no excuse for an English teacher taking off points for a student using MLA 7 when you were still stuck in MLA 6.

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(serge/gilbert, poetic explorations of how to ruin a teenage boy)

To kiss, Serge suspects, is to explore. Fair enough. Kissing is a gesture of romance, of joy, of the things men and women know just preceding the gestures of intimacy that lead to broader horizons.

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(hot for teacher, 4/?)

John, ultimately, said yes to your proposal. 

It’s been a month—a month and a few days, actually—since then, and while you’ve revealed it to the coworkers you converse with (Rose and Jade) as a hoax, as far as anyone else in the school knows, you and John have finally decided to go public about your relationship.

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(hot for teacher, 3/?)

“Damn.” Once you close the door behind you, safely away from any prying little ears—and you do slam back against the wall, hard and loud, just to chase away anyone brave enough to try to listen in—you are forced to bow to John’s superior skills. “You’ve got those kids whipped.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, flattered despite the anxiety you’ve probably set a-fluttering in his innocent, sweatervested chest. “They like me. They are also just pants-shittingly scared of me.”

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(john/dave, the prelude to birthday sex)

The two of you fall back on the bed, a delighted, breathless “heh!” from John as he hits the sheets providing the perfect soundtrack to the rest of the night.

You kiss him, he kisses back, and he wraps his legs around you to suggest you into a more comfortable position for a hot and heavy makeout session.

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(hot for teacher, 2/?)

In the time it took for you to bolt from John’s room to yours, the rumors began to fly, proven and then exacerbated by the power of social networking—you discover almost immediately, then, that you have become an advocate of banning cell phones in school. 

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(dirk/jake, knowledge)

When he sees you, he kisses you.

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