1.
The most haunted places in America
are schools.

Not graveyards, not hospitals
or roads devoid of light. 
Places where massacres
occurred come close.

Incomplete lives walk the halls,
brush by you as you pass through,
sit crowded silently in rows,
staring at you with cellophane eyes.

Watch them,
some of them still in the flesh,
come to the board
and touch definitions chalked up there
for ease
in sorting:

red, brown,
yellow, black;

poor, rich,
good boy,
good girl;

blocked out in
white chalk
for all to see.

See them slip through those walls
as if they did not exist, slip into
the world, mystery children
grown into mystery adults
who do not understand each other.

2.
This is a ghost factory and
you’re a product, most likely,
but who dares blame
anyone for this? 

They taught
the plan they were given, you learned
the things you were taught. 

If something
made no sense,
you whispered the truth
no matter that no one listens:
I’m something else.  Not this.

Your whole life became a whisper
aimed at the ears of those who could hear.

3.
And all that talk
about
preparing the new
workforce —

what about
preparing them
to think?  Is that the
antithesis of work?
To teach them how
to stand outside themselves
and see the larger
world, its slots and pigeon holes —

to teach them how to fly
on their variegated wings?

4.
Something stirring now —

the urge to tell
truth in its colors,
not pure colors, not assigned
hues, but the real thing:

the urge to life. the urge and duty
and passion for seeing

their eyes
opaque again,
solid and alive;

learning to see
what’s true, what is
not simple:

exorcisms
of generations
of ghosts,

the breaking of spectral chains
wherever they’re found.