An Ode to a Magnetic Poetry Board at an All-Male Jesuit High School

My dear stainless-steel graffiti window,
kin to Scrabble, crosswords, and bathroom stalls.

I consult you like the stars,
for your galaxies give me hope.

O, chrome Oracle,
who knows what new miracle
my students will uncover in you today.
They study over you like historians,
like soothsayers, like Ph.ds
looking for clues, connections,
ways to unlock secret knowledge.

But instead of discovering a new species
of dinosaur, a cure for cancer,
a solution to global warming,
they have invented new meanings
for words like chocolate, apparatus and moan.
Words like puppies, pudding, and alps
are no longer the stuff of nursery rhymes.
In you they have hunted down every breast and digit,
every milk-y, sweat-y, and meat-y.
They have found every dark corner
of your shining face.

I tip my hat to your vinyl tile alphabet,
your chicken soup of pubescent spirit.
As much as I try to exterminate
every possibility of innuendo
you keep producing a bizarre harvest
of the sacred and profane.

In you, students have become masters
of the gerund, purveyors of metaphor,
word farmers pulling new language from rocky soil,
a playground for language,
a slum for the mind,

a barren new planet full of fields
where they said life could not grow.