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Measurable Objective
Published with Impspired Literary Magazine January 2020
poetry
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Here’s to my boys
who romp and leap
and conquer and think
and ask and make
and dig and search
and joke and create
and learn all of the ways
to break things apart
and build them new again.

Here’s to my boys
who tolerate poetry
but prefer swords
and rocks and dirt
and bikes and soaring
over mound of snow
and leaping off cliffs
into quarries and huddling
around fires at night.

And to you, my boys,
I swear on my motherhood
that I will never confine you to that
which undoes you or attempts conformity
in the name of supposed progress
or measurement or any other such nonsense
that attempts to hold you in place in a chair
in front of standardized teeny circles
on endless pieces of paper that mean nothing.

​If all you ever learn
is a measurable objective
then I have failed you.