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enjoy this Kenneth DiMaggio writing in the free cc&d Tax Day 2011 PDF file chapbook Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead				You can also order this as a 2011 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead

Window

Kenneth DiMaggio

No more thirty second
bells
that drill clanged loud
enough
to shatter any
thought
pornographic or subversive
which were the only thoughts
you would have
at fourteen and upon graduating
from Nathan Hale Junior High
School in those last days
of June it was like a country
without a leader and
what few students that still showed up
like yourself
could finally hall pass-
free roam-fully wander and
pause before a tall arched
window in a classroom
that for you and twenty others
was a prison
for most of this year until
this atomic age of blue collar
delinquents got Miss Terwilliger
to retire

—the goal of every punk
and hoodlum she taught
since The Great Depression

And now...

the windows that she never let
anybody open

—until your class rebellion
opened them last week

And if a small New England
mill town grime and furnace-flavored
pollution was finally able
to dust-settle in

it was into a room empty
except for a few student
desks shoved in a corner
and a few pictures of long side-
burned presidents above the blackboard

and then the sound
you never expected to hear

—the squeaking of a window
that you never thought
you would close
and on something
that for a moment
you thought
you could stop

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