MPitS - Mendocino High School

MPitS

Mendocino High School

2002/2003

If you bat your eyes in that way
make sure five people see you
one with annoyed glances
one with amorous glances
one with common interest
one with perplexed emotions
and one who'd rather be in bed

When you abuse one person include the other four
one with laughing fingers
one with intangible cheeks
one with pampered toenails
and one with blank freckles

Whenyou are silent with two friends,
make sure three are listening
one with purple glassed eyes
one with mocking elbows
and one with glistening wrists.

When you stand three people up
invite two more
one with rings on her fingers
and one with energetic ears.

When four are unfriendly
remain with one
one with her mother's nose.

Eve Perrill
12th grade
Bill Lemos, classroom teacher

I saw the best minds
(of my generation) being lost on themselves
needing something more left behind falling back
and then forward
all the good ones pulled apart
with no intensity of their own
craving the buck of a different time swept up
all through the backwash and bushmen hippies gone
capitalist parent
(My generation) is lost on even themselves
in house-play sexuality and misinformation
not enough splinters and too much fear.
We're pulled back and pushed out and don't
know where to go and try to find ourselves in ranting noncommittal
nothings paging through empty books,
oh wait, I forgot we don't read.
Everything left too easy and nothing to fight for
a generation of confused and suicidal accountants
and computer software programmers.
Everything is at (my generation's) hands and nothing
being done, we sleep through eternity and waste
away a fortune.
Hypochondriac and scared to look into the sun,
we feel the power of inheritance
and throw it up again
raging against the burden of something not won by
our own blood.

Simone Owings, 11th grade
Bill Lemos, classroom teacher

Red is the color of hate
such that it burns with flame
It is a quest to incendiary
sparks-like dance.
Red lies
on the bed, it rests
feet pronounced with a stress
on the second syllable
red is ruby chapped lips
glossy and pursed.
red is tongue
a tongue that shies and quivers
with softer sounds of m's
There it hides, red and childish.
Behind the sliding door, smudges the glass
with tiny pocket-sized hands
peering out to adults
Red is all but innocent
knowing of rape
Red is the color of hate.

Michael Mangahas, 12th grade
Bill Lemos, classroom teacher

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