while I'm swimming in a materialist smoothie /or/ stay in your lane and you get a gold star

in second grade I wrote this thing so neat and square you could build a mall on it

every line held its weight like gravity sucked it into itself and anyway: it was one of those shitty school things a class poem, Miss called it (adult me asks, “In the Marxist sense, isn’t everything?”)

got the gold star, grinned in the spotlight, read it in assembly showed the other kids that a fat nerd didn’t need to fight with fists then I did anyway, and of course winning sucks.

the piece kept repeating this phrase: “while I’m swimming, while I’m swimming” kept looping, like swirling cement, just like everything else: concrete and endless all at once.

PS: Sorry that was eleven lines, sir. I tried to stay in my lane.

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[In response to a prompt from my poetry professor, Dr Peter Anderson: write ten lines of poetry on the topic of swimming, preferably at night.]

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