Michael Pruchnicki Poems

Read someone's ten commandments
posted on the board ages ago
when the earth was green
and slithy toves wimbled!
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When I was a high school student
sentenced to two years durance vile
at Saint Ignatius
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Toss the participles in the pot, chef!
Throw in a an active verb or two
throbbing with bloody life
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I knew a couple of guys who spent their youth
in POW camps on Bataan and in Japan
enlisted men serving in a peacetime Army
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every seat in room 340 was taken
when mr. dugan entered

first day of teaching full-time
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You can google the term pantoum
and learn its technique of writing
a poem and saying everything twice
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he wrote and rewrote
revised and edited

what he called verse
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Killing each other in the heat of battle
gets the heart to pumping and pops
the adrenaline mainline into the veins.
No one is bored then, that's for sure
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'We live in a republic of drivel, Celia!
Listen to the numbskulls with college degrees
go on and on about the students slaughtered
in DeKalb on St Valentine's Day, will you?
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We lived next to a building
in Back of the Yards
full of shanty Irish
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