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John came into my writing workshop in his high-top shoes —
the heavy athletic kind — without laces, so they flopped on his feet like
flippers. The backs were tromped down, and he had colored the tongues with a
fluorescent orange marker. He didn’t wear socks, his pants were too short,
and he was wearing a T-shirt even though the temperature was close to
freezing. Boasting that he didn’t need a jacket, he rubbed his skinny arms
and said he was cold. His dark curly hair was wild, uncut, and uncombed. His
glasses were askew, and he looked at me through the bottoms of the lenses as
he tipped his head back and spit out a greeting.
I could read parts of his past in his face — growing up in a
troubled family, no money, not enough to eat, no new clothes, probably not
even a notebook when school started. He had been teased, had no friends. I learned later that his family moved frequently, often to trailer
parks or campgrounds where they would live in tents for months. School had
been torture for John, and I was going to pay for it. When I spoke to him,
he usually responded with a scowl, “So what?” or “I don’t care.” But
sometimes he would form his hands into cat’s claws and hiss at me to show
that he would have none of me, my smooth talk, or my games designed to
seduce him into an education. He was a master at keeping everyone away.
John was as angry about the writing workshop as he was about
everything else in his world. He hated it. He hated writing. He had nothing
to say. He sat solemnly at his desk, searching for an opportunity to make
trouble with classmates sitting near him. He refused to let anyone read his
work and promptly shredded and dropped on the floor the folders I gave him
to keep his papers in. He stated over and over, “This class sucks.”
John loved the computer, though, and would spend as much
time as possible sitting behind one, glowering at anyone who came too close.
Once he told me he was writing a story about a dysfunctional family where
the dad hit the children all the time and there wasn’t any love. “It’s all
from my imagination, you know,” he told me. Eventually, he would ask my
advice about a line or a punctuation mark, or have me listen to something he
was writing. He always cocked his head to the side, looked at me through the
bottoms of his glasses, and said “Hmmm” when I answered.
One day, he approached my desk warily. “Do you want to read
my poem?” he asked. He didn’t slide away this time, but stood near me as I
took his poem and read it. I don’t remember any of the exact words or even
the title. But the meaning of the poem and that moment are crystal clear in
my memory. He had written a four-stanza poem about the hole in his life,
about what was missing and where it had gone. At the end of each stanza, he
asked the question, “Will it ever be filled up?”
John wrote about the way he viewed the world and how he felt about his place
in it. His poems spoke of the things he felt were wrong with him and wrong
with his life, as in “There’s Something Missing.”
There’s Something Missing
there is an empty place where
it
should be, but I can’t
seem
to fill it.
I have looked
at myself and said “what’s
wrong with me?”
but
still there
is a space
that I cannot fill.
maybe I’ll find it someday
maybe I’ll fill
the hole
but until then
there’s something
missing.
what can it be?
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