The Cruellest Month

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho

Even when they glitter they are grey, my mondays.
I drag my dainty boots up three flights of stairs
past vast cocks scrawled onto walls and receding
behind institutional repaints. At this pale hour on a monday
there is no rubbish, no reek of urine, no roar.

Weekends are free, your hair can go feral, your skirts
can go up, or come down. Weekends you swear. You lift
your voice to sing with the band, and it cracks and shatters
from a week of projections, and worse. Mondays you cover
yourself up. Your secret knickers reach your armpits.

I am too short to see my face in the bathroom mirror.
I know I am drawn. Two days of sabbatical should be enough;
everyone knows that teachers are overpaid, have short hours
and too many holidays. There are no excuses for the aches,
in my short limbs, in my hoarse voice that no longer sings.

Friday's date rests on the board and I smear it away,
change that one to a four. My paragraph on how
to structure a paragraph bores even me, with its topic
sentence in red, evidence from the text in green,
elaboration in black and the link back to the thesis in blue.

I sip my soapy coffee. I envisage scooping up my folders
and letting them drop casually out the window, three storeys
down. I want to write FTP and FTW in permanent marker
on the shabby beige walls, trace a misshapen phallus.
I don't. I won't. I never do. I have pencils to sharpen.







April 4—back-to-work