things I learned reading student essays

Society is changing every day.

In this modern time, the government have come up with the idea of marriage, in China.

But it's too difficult to find such a person. So women always ask where's the Mr. Write; then they wait and wait.

Now, most of family only have one child for each family. "The new people" who was born after 1880.

People can plus some.

the infinite

Bus to Baravoye

The giants walked here
On the road and left the fields pristine
Except for the occasional pool of a footstep
In the distance,
Occasioned by black storks.
Yesterday we littered
Snickers bar wrappers
In the grass while
The boys peed on the shoulder and
The girls, behind a line of plain trees.
They said that one day's journey from here
You would find the seat where Ablai Khan
Ruled, from the base of the mountain
But I didn't believe them then
Because we came after the men, who
Left behind the remains of car jacks and pulleys
Tired of resurrecting life from buses.


Outside

Spider star lights along the diverted river
Concrete bank, the same place where children swim
When it's too hot to do anything else.
When it's too hot for dogs, usually impatient
With the silent tread of strangers outside the gate
And when the trees darken with roosts
Marking their spots in drops.
Where men spread blankets
And sleep in the laps of women
While the sun becomes invisible.
It's only the gypsy children awake
In the shade of the Heroes monument
Soldiers bursting out of rock,
Star studded light silhouetted heads
Moving about.
Here, here lie the heads.
Here, here lie the hands.
Here, here...

that first summer

I was out of university first year and on my own. A Toronto summer. How could I forget those April mornings after exams were all done the skies still pulsed blue in the cool morning? It was then I took the liberty of engaging myself in useful work with a publishing company. I liked books. They wanted to publish. It seemed like a good fit until I realized that I would be selling the books they published. Well, it was a bit of a disappointment to know that I wouldn't be with the books, but still, selling, what a deal! But then on the first day of training - my first job that had me sitting in a swivel chair - realizing that selling was simply a mask for what could be termed attempting to sell, telemarketing.

There I was, suckered, I suppose of my own accord and fancy after having dreamt up that I would be there with the smell and splash of ink on my hands and forearms. A summer of, perhaps, accidents with the press, paper being jammed, a print with a libellous error, or perhaps even an accidental death. My penchant for the slightly morbid has abated some since then.

I held on to those dreams until the first day of work, hoping that somewhere in the basement of the building, or perhaps even another floor, that machines would be printing copies of masterpieces, Austen, Eliot, Homer. I must have dreamed my way through the training where they, as I later found out, told us about selling email and fax directories. The idea sounded good the first time you said it, as if someone would use something of that nature to look up an address, but once you explained your job a second time and what exactly you were selling you realized the futility of it all. Couldn't someone just filter your emails and if all else failed simply change their address?

Still, I called Coca-Cola, Ford, peanut butter factories, a monastery. I pulled lead sheets of phone numbers and talked to people who got to the office at seven in the morning, or in the case of the monastery, who were there all the time.

We were a motley bunch on the eighth floor of that building on Peter Street and there wasn't much holding us together except for the view. From our swivel chairs and particleboard cubicles we'd gaze out the floor ceiling windows looking out over the downtown. The old bank towers hidden among the new skyscrapers, the shadows of the buildings moving like the slow folds of a bed sheet on a Saturday morning. The shadows growing longer, deeper shades of grey-black, casting complete darkness on the street below, a midday eclipse.

It was that beauty that kept us there, but even that beauty was not enough. I sold nothing and was bored. I quit and at home sat out on the roof watching the pigeons make circles in the evening sky remembering the labyrinth of downtown, there to my right, there growing dark with each moment, marching slowly into the night.