Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

See, I like this poem a lot, but I think he's full of shit. Pencils are not sad. One of my favorite places to go is L.L. Weans and other teacher supply stores. I love the hyperrealistic turkeys and leaves you can find this time of year, stick-on Norman Rockwell montages, time lines. Math games and manipulatives: I never used but still love the hundred plastic teddy bears I bought to teach the kids arithmetic (I think I used it a bit w/Primera but never Secundo, who has a flair for math); tesselations, three-dimensional rectangular solids, tangrams. It's a happier place for me than Disneyland: all kinds of possibilities.