Allie's Poem

Jason here...

OK, read this poem Allie wrote earlier this year:
Translation:

My Life

I sit on the bench waiting for the bus.
I sit on the bus waiting for my house.
I have arrived at my house.
I sit waiting for my dinner.
I lay on my bed waiting for my life to be over.

by Allie Payne

Her teachers were dumbfounded as were we at parent teacher conference. So where did this come from?

Dad gene: Likes poetry, not at all flexible (yeah, at all)
Mom gene: Likes cooking, very flexible

The result:
OK, so flexibility solved. Check.
Back to the poem mystery.

I like to listen to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, a little audio clip that is played daily as I drive into work. For example, play the audio clip here:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/09/04

His format is-

1) talk about this day in history
2) describe some (typically) disturbed crazy writer and their tortured lives and lovers
3) read a poem

I like 1) and 3).

I like to share the poems with Joy and at times others. Some are very moving, some funny, and others just OK. I shared the podcast (link above) to Joy sometime last October?

The Jobholder

by David Ignatow

I stand in the rain waiting for my bus
and in the bus I wait for my stop.
I get let off and go to work
where I wait for the day to end
and then go home, waiting for the bus,
of course, and my stop.

And at home I read and wait
for my hour to go to bed
and I wait for the day I can retire
and wait for my turn to die.

****

Who knows what the writer had in mind. I actually took it as a little darkly humorous and how it feels sometimes right before a good vacation. It made me smile and I played it for Joy.

So, as it turns out (now putting things together half a year later), Allie listened to it too. I asked her about her poem last night. She remembers hearing this poem and thought it was "cute" an "about an old man" and not at all dark or depressing. So when free writing time came around in her class, she wrote her version of the poem.

Mystery solved... Check.

When Wesley can't touch his toes but can whip up a wicked bisque we'll know what happened.