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Broken Window Theory
I escort third-graders
into the classroom.
and rifle the desks’ contents.
Two fight over a bean-bag chair.
I threaten to call their parents.
They stop,
until I turn my back.
I asked other teachers
how they discipline their
classes.
“Jump on the instigator right
away.
If you wait, the rest of the
class will join in.”
“He’s sitting in my chair and won’t move!”
I ask the blond boy with pink-eye to sit elsewhere.
He refuses.
I lift him out of the seat.
“I wouldn’t touch the kids.
Their parents might sue.
Call the offender in front of
class.
It embarrasses him.
Children hate that.”
I demonstrate the difference
between checkmate and stalemate.
The red-haired class clown keeps talking.
“Hey Redhead!
Come up here.
Show us how to get a checkmate.”
He walks around the front of the room
ass protruding
saying, “I’m Chess Man. I’m Chess Man.”
“You’ve got to win their
respect.
Try playing them
and beating them badly.”
I finish the lesson.
Children set up chess boards.
“Can I play you, Chess Man?”
The student plays pawn to e4.
I respond with e5.
Jasmine chases a boy in a baseball hat
saying, “He stole my pencil.”
Class clown loses, screams,
and tosses his pieces in the air for effect.
Soon knights, bishops, and rooks are flying everywhere.
“Give them candy as a reward.
Parents in the Bay Area object,
but they don’t mind here.”
Time’s up.
I hand licorice sticks
to the kids who put chess sets away.
“We have to go back to the auditorium.”
The pink-eyed sociopath remains seated.
“Let’s go, please.
We’re going to be late.”
He doesn’t move.
I imagine these children,
already skilled in oppressing their fellow man,
using the strategy I teach
to muscle their way to domination.
One day you will work for the
girl
who fought for the bean-bag chair.
The class clown will become an IRS auditor.
Baseball hat - a general.
Pink-eye - somebody’s president.
Bombs fall on Baghdad.
This poem
appeared in Jon Wesick’s chapbook, My Father’s Ashes
Holding a Ph.D. in physics and having studied Buddhism
for twenty years, Jon Wesick has enjoyed a front row seat at a
collision of worldviews. When he spots a shiny piece of wreckage, he darts
into the roadway and retrieves a poem, story, or novel. He has published
over seventy poems in small press journals like American Tanka,
Anthology Magazine, The Blind Man’s Rainbow, Edgz, The Kaleidoscope Review,
Limestone Circle, The Magee Park Anthology, The Publication, Pudding,
Sacred Journey, San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Slipstream, Tidepools, Vortex
of the Macabre, Zillah, and others. His chapbook, My Father’s
Ashes, won runner up in the San Diego Book Awards.
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