Category Archives: College memories

College Daze

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College Daze

I should have been cramming for English—­reading Macbeth or Candide­
and finishing off all my papers on Shakespeare or Becket or Bede.
But I always put off all assignments until the last possible minute,
lugging around every textbook without really looking within it.

When final week came, I was panicked. I studied all day and all night.
Living on No Doz and coffee, my eyes were a terrible sight.
Bloodshot and ringed with dark circles, they read on and read on nonetheless—
Chaucer and Dickens and Somerset Maugham (and Cliff’s Notes, I have to confess.)

My very worst procrastination was ten papers in just seven days—
my mind racing onward and onward as I searched for each insightful phrase.
Biology, German and history, psychology and all the rest
battled to come to the front and be heard when they came to be put to the test.

By the end I was crazed and exhausted, craving only closed eyes and my bed—
putting authors and symbols and figures and facts right out of my overstuffed head.
I could have avoided this torment, the pressure, exhaustion and dread
If only I’d started three months in advance to prepare for each “big day ahead.”

In college I fear I was guilty. I put all things off just a smidge.
I majored in procrastination and minored in marathon bridge!

( This poem is dedicated to Marti, Yvonne, Patty, Ramjet, Karen Rea and all the house hashers, with whom I wasted many a long college afternoon and evening expanding my mind by playing bridge. I must admit that I haven’t played it since, which is why I have the time to write a poem a day and post it on my blog. Sometimes we learn more after college than during!)

The Prompt: Big Day Ahead—It’s the night before an important event: a big exam, a major presentation, your wedding. How do you calm your nerves in preparation for the big day?

NaPoWriMo Day 11: Strawberry Hill Forever

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Poets have been writing about love and wine, wine and love, since the time of Anacreon, a Greek poet who was rather partial to that subject matter. Anacreontics might be described as a sort of high-falutin’ drinking song. So, today our prompt was to write about wine-and-love.

Strawberry Hill Forever

So take we rum and take we Coke
and sippy-straws so we don’t choke
on ice and limes within our glasses
and fall dead on our tipsy asses.

Let us to Elysian fields
take our drinks and also meals:
cheese and grapes and shepherd’s pie,
potato chips and ham on rye.

Let us frolic in the lee
without your kids—just you and me.
Spread a blanket and have some fun.
Show ourselves to the morning sun.

If perchance you’d prefer wine,
well, you take yours and I’ll take mine.
I’ve chosen well. I think I will
take some Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill

found in a box of college things:
pennants, books and old class rings.
This dinosaur, screw top intact,
we must imbibe, it is a fact,

to stir libidos and memory
so I might take thee on my knee,
cop a feel of thy lovely ass
and roll thee in the green green grass.

Afterwards, we’ll fill our lips
with sandwiches and pie and chips.
No satyr dined on lovelier fare.
No nymph tasted food more rare.

And when the sun falls in the west,
we’ll cork our wine, pack up our chest
and hurry home. We can’t be late.
Your husband’s getting home at eight.