Secrets from the Short Bus

As a child
I hardly talked at school,
they understood no secrets.

I never read their libraries,
though a few animal books
showed faces that understood my meaning.

In the area
of math I excelled
and yet had no language
yet to say it.

Cloistered from normality,
whatever that entailed,
I was left to dream
undetected
for a quarter frame of life
until a mad professor
explored my writings
in a note,
"I'm not exactly sure,"
he stammered,
"what it is you mean to say,
but there is something here
and so I will encourage you
to continue writing."

That note,
still kept
in a college note pad,
folded as it was
the day delivered
has served
to egg me on
for 40 years.

For even though
it may be true that,
"Two short buses do not a long bus make,"
it is just as valid
to say that what I learned
about the world
from where they cloistered me
was more than inspiration needed
for my life to be set free.

I would not have
your normal
for all the adulations there,
for in my mind the secrets
are too heavy them to bare.

runningturtle87