you go to school

Would you like a photo?

Take that mortgage

On the dogs

If they bite

We lose it all

if they don‘t

You go to school

And you learn a sense of pride in guilt

Through painful bouts of drinking

You snuck beer to class

Every monday

Until two of the group dropped out

Too young to have a place to sleep

With nobody to scold

I was seventeen years old

All the weed I rolled and sold

When I found a job

And fell in love

I left for Vietnam

Volunteering in the summer

Came back blind, with open eyes

I had all the talks I needed

Two more years to finish school

By the time I did, I loved it

I had dreams of being cool

In the search for friends and fortune

I kept going down the hole

PPE for just two weeks

I ain‘t doing all that math

I signed up for just philosophy and politics

and grew

read Adorno, then Mark Fisher

and I loved it, through and through

wrote my papers

lived through covid

found a job 

attending kids

now I pay the bills I have to

It won’t get better than this