erasure

[ellajam]

Oh, I enjoyed this. I have great admiration for successful students, I could never tolerate the feeling you describe so well.

I pull the eraser out
of my mechanical pencil,
roll it between my fingertips,
feel the rubber heat up.
It is active, warm, useful—
everything that I am currently not.
I want to rub it on my skin,
obliterate myself from the day.

would be a fine poem on its own, titled Student, Class or Bad Professor.

Well done, thanks for posting it.

“thus, art is subjective, as human beings
are not inherently objective creatures…”

the instructor says, and I nod, drawing
a caricature of her in my notebook
alongside scribbles about the Willow Tea Room
and twentieth century Scottish architecture.

I pull the eraser out
of my mechanical pencil,
roll it between my fingertips,
feel the rubber heat up.
It is active, warm, useful—
everything that I am currently not.
I want to rub it on my skin,
obliterate myself from the day.

Instead, I erase the crude drawing,
replace it with notes on Neuschwanstein castle
and daydream of throwing myself from a turret.