Attendance
Purple hair. Nostrilized silver balls.
Eastern calligraphy writ on wrist.
Jeans riding low, skirts rising barely
within the confines of the dress code:
These days, I must attend to the others,
the properly groomed and dressed.
Hands folded, they sit in perfect rows,
patient with buffering PowerPoints
and videos. Their No. 2 pencils,
bayonet sharp. Their blackened ovals,
neat and dark as their own polite suffering.