This is from Honors Humanities (Spring Semester 2000.)

Step forward fearlessly
Or as fearless as the afraid can be.
Keep the wall between what is out there
What you know,
What you don't know,
What you are afraid to know.

Put on your pearls
Or straighten you tie
As a replica of yesterday begins.
The stage is set for the same play.

The one performed over and over like a well rehearsed dance
A standard two step for a pair
Male led and performed with no error
No heeled shoes stepping on toes

Live the good life through directions found
Between the glossy images of hometown Venuses
Whose voices you will never hear talk about settling down
Only to be the fuel for half-cooked fantasies
That show exactly what you wish to be

A life in the fast lane
Something more
Escaping to a land of perfect martinis
In a brightly painted monster of steel
Leaving your wife to scrub the skid marks
From her white picket fence.

Martini tears fall on a painted face
Or perhaps of bourbon,
Or Scotch,
Or another false security.
Worries left to sit on the bottom of an empty glass.
Forgotten until the pounding echoes of their screams
Welcome the newly risen sun.

A trip on the train to Miltown
For paint to repair the silver lining.
A fresh coat of paint will do wonders
For the cracks on Cloud 9.
No one would ever know.
Things would look perfectly normal
Or what normal seems to be.

Just put the pass in the drawer,
In the cabinet,
On the shelf.
It'll be there for the next time
Watching for the cracks to appear again
While your children are taught to seek salvation
Under a shelter of ink stained wood.
Shelter from anything that would endanger the lessons
Taught from prefabricated text,
From the reality that there is no sure knowledge
That all will be well.

Escape into the black and white world
That casts its light upon your face.
Full of happy faces
Free from the ill of the world
With a hero riding into the sunset of some Hollywood backlot
As others write yet another name
Before the ink of the first is even dry to the touch
In hopes of having a vision seen
Slipped through the bars created by the names
Of those deemed undesirable
So all would not worry about being stabbed in the back
By a red pen.

Hang the watercolor pictures over the mirrors
Pictures of happy faces
Hide the truth
For reflections are worse than skeletons,
Unable to be shut away in dark corners
In hopes that they will be forgotten.
The slick surface cuts through the image
Like a dull knife
Making a tear
To get a glimpse of the reality behind the candy coating,
Under the pearls,
And neckties,
And the shelters attacked by ink.

Keep the pictures hanging there
But do not look so closely
For you may find the pretty colors are fading
And the gilded edges have begun to turn green.