-Pride and banishment-

I wouldn’t go so far as to say

that I was incorrigible as a schoolboy.

I can name more than a few who were,

but I wasn’t one of them.

none-the-less, I often travelled

from detention hall on Tuesday,

to detention hall on Wednesday with the best of them.

the girl who wore the oversized
black leather hot-rod jacket to school,

the kind worn by older guys
who drove fast machines,
was unique that day among the field
of starched dresses
and pressed chino slacks,
forced upon the rest of us,
the children of mothers
who sent us neatly on our way
into the visual doldrums of daily attendance. 

the jacket, I was later to learn, belonged

to her big brother who was away on sabbatical

learning the gas-pumping trade in Rhode Island.

the girl was promptly suspended

for refusing to take the jacket off and refusing to promise 
never to wear it to school again.

but she came back that very afternoon
wearing the same jacket,
this time with her mother in tow.

how dare they dictate what her daughter

wear or not wear! the mother screamed

at old Miss Stanton, the heavy-handed,
heavy-set principal, the terrible matron
of the Hugo A. Dubuque School,
for the first time on the receiving end
of a sharp tongue.

"you freakin' think you freakin' shit ice-cream or somethin’"?!!

four doors toward the back staircase,
the mild-mannered Miss Pollard was mortified.

she closed the door to our classroom.

she locked the windows down and drew the blinds.
she told the class of giggling kids to sit still,

but the girl was soon traded

to the Incorrigible-Wing of the Ruggles School,
as close to penitentiary a 14 year old girl could get,
short a finding of murder in the first degree.

as for me, looking through the clouded
window of personal history I find her,

walking the long florescent corridor,—

the lonely last mile to the ominous Ruggles School,

wearing her older brother's oversized black-leather hot-rod jacket
belligerently emblazoned across its back:

                Spark Plugs
                Fall River