As a matter of fact,

school was a matter of form. As for example the long rectangular rooms lined up and down with long rows of square desks running parallel the walls, dictated by a chart drawn up in-advance of reality and thumb-tacked at the front of the room. We forced down three square meals per day. Three regular meals unpackaged and packed into lunch-boxes by mothers with stiff triangular dresses. Being regular children still in school we studied regularly, as studies regularly informed the administration how rules and regulations force conformity and deform creativity. School rules and regulations therefore dictated that this must not be so, that this was bad form. Form was still the matter with school. We memorized the long forms and the short forms, we memorized the forms of decorum, as for example the square sheets of paper we would accept upon graduation to decorate the walls of the businesses we would inherit from our fathers fathers with their square-framed glasses remembered in square-framed artifacts of light displayed on desks in businesses inherited from the American Dream oh and speaking of if you looked up dream in the d section of the dictionary at the front of the room the definition referred to reality in the r section which referred back to dream in the d section and so on no matter but never never look up dictionary in the d section of the dictionary no matter what we dressed in uniforms and in history class we memorized how history forms a circle in economics class we memorized how business forms a circle in science class we memorized how a tree forms a circle in math class we measured the form of the circle in art class we drew lines that curved around and became circles in PE we ran in circles in writing class we wrote in circles circling such words as still mattered in counseling we learned how to dream in a triangle. And outside of class we watched the water in the toilet spiral & spiral down the longest drain

Originally from Los Alamos, NM, William Repass is currently working towards an MFA at Hollins University. He writes criticism for Film International Magazine and has published both poetry and prose in Berkeley Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Counterexample Poetics, Futures Trading, and elsewhere.