On Seeing a Chicken Hawk Being Raised Among Pullets, Or the End of the Year Junior High Classroom Address by the Teacher’s Assistant

Much easier to just be honest, tell the truth and why not
The worst that can happen is someone gets mad
Really what then
They get mad so what
In the history of this country
In particular and the world more generally
Compared to the number of times someone has gotten upset
Emotional, angry, etc.
The number of instances another person has gotten seriously
Or not so seriously for that matter injured
Much less killed
As a direct result of said party
Becoming completely emotionally unhinged
Irate to the point that self-indulgent histrionics veer off into real violence
Visited on another person
Is infinitesimal furthermore consider
The vast majority of times
A person or people have suffered death or grave injury
As a result of someone else’s anger outrage disappointment
Whatever the reason wasn’t personal
Rather abstract universal principled in its way
Think improvised explosive devices
Left in the middle of empty ghost-like streets
Or at the side of a dusty, lonely stretch of road
Hand grenades lobbed into crowded cafes
The trench warfare of yore
Men in gas masks
Crimped nozzles dangling slack from stylized snouts
Bayonets on rifle tips
As they clamber up the sides of muddy trenches and charge
Poisonous gas billowing around them
Or take mass murderers
Most of the time murder for them is a necessity
Forced upon them by circumstance
Careening out of control
Imposed from without
Or maybe just some guy
Plowing a delivery truck into a crowd of pedestrians
Because he can’t take it anymore
Then getting out and finishing off as many of the injured as he can
With a carving knife he’s been carrying around for weeks
Not quite realizing why
When passionate anger personified takes you
It won’t be someone you know
Or let’s face it for reasons you will be aware of
Even comprehend a little bit
Before it’s too late
So just relax and when asked
Tell the truth
Not to say there won’t be some hurt feelings broken trust tears
Smashed crockery holes busted here and there in drywall
Dents and pings in the polished stainless steel refrigerator door
So it looks like someone unloaded a box of buckshot shells at it
While their spouse or whoever cowered behind
But it was actually canned goods
Squirreled away in the pantry for the long winter
Hurled across the kitchen
Broken panes in windows torn upholstery shredded dress shirts
In the bottom of the closet still
The worst you imagine
If having like me grown up in a violent and abusive family
That left you at the tender age of eleven
Gazing at your parents and siblings
1000 yards away
And arranged as series of points on a hexagon
Your already abstracted imagination imposed on the oval dinner table
Post-traumatic in primary school
Flashbacks migraines fugue-states
Intrusive memories violent fantasies
The worst you imagine
In all the worst-case scenarios
Never happens
So the next time someone asks
My little charges
Parent teacher vice principal whoever
Asks did you study do your homework hit Takeshi steal Amy’s eraser
Just take a deep breath and tell them
What they want to know
This isn’t a license to tell the truth
Just because it suits you however remember
There’s a difference between being honest and telling the truth
Which advice is to say yes I
Your local school board-sanctioned authority figure
So important in your young and presently at least one dimensional, impressionable lives
Lie not just to myself
But lie also to family friends colleagues clients supervisors the police
Even perfect strangers
Lie neither out of disregard to honesty
Nor out of convenience 
But rather to keep things steady, on the level
Keep things going in a productive direction
This admission means also
One or both of my parents
If not an alcoholic or drug addict then at the very least
Suffered from one of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder’s many classifications
           of obsessive-compulsive or addiction disorders
Which disease in order to be controlled
Required the aforementioned parent or parents’ involvement in a 12 step program
Which involvement
Essential for the so-called “recovery”
That’s not really recovery at all
But just keeps the disease in check said recovery
A bulwark against the malfunctioning of one of the most important people in a young person’s life
Which involvement in a twelve-step support program
Which bulwark against the most damaging effects of the disease wasn’t there
Causing me after the long arduous journey to more or less complete and functional personhood
To in any and all circumstances
Interpersonal intrapersonal
Hedge my bets keep my cards close to my vest
But never look like I’m keeping my cards close to my vest
Lie but out of desire for harmonious relationships never let on that I’m lying
This façade not easy since from childhood I’ve had an extreme distaste for all forms of dishonesty
Nothing less than outright hostility and contempt for those who do lie
You see I’ve made terms
Not just with lying to practically everyone around me all the time
But also with lying to myself
The constant stream of lies I tell myself everyday
Just to keep going keep myself from cracking up
Succumbing to self-consciousness and shame
Caused by the trace of childhood trauma
The extreme shock and distress of traumatic experience
A path cut through the wilderness of your soul
All who come later will follow
Simply because it’s there
The way the cone-shaped diamond tip
Of the turntable stylus slips into the concentric spiral
The trench of hiss and pop of shiny black vinyl silence
Before the music begins
The barely perceptible four grams of vertical pressure
Bearing down into the groove
Over thousands of hours totaling more than twenty tons of pressure
Per square inch on the acetate disc that is the cross-section
Of your damaged soul
Little by little taking a toll
Until the rough gash of trauma is as smooth and worn
As the path small animals might burrow through undergrowth at the edge of someone’s yard
Friends family even total strangers doing this
Keeping the wound fresh
Until it’s such an established part of your personality
That it defines every single interaction in your life
Even interactions with yourself
Until the wound is time zero
Erasing everything that came before
The ultimate reference point
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors notwithstanding
There’s not much you can do
And even those drugs really don’t change anything
Merely make the anger denial shame bargaining and eventual disappointment
The coming to terms with how you’re going to have to live out the rest of your life more palatable
           and why bother
You’re going to have to do what you have to do if you want to survive
So might as well get on with it
Easy to tell by the way many of you are staring at me
Like I’m insane that you’re wondering why I’m telling you this
Not to mention the primary instructor has quietly slipped out of the door
And is as we speak probably in the hall messaging the principal
I know perfectly well my words are inapplicable to many of you
If not nearly all of you
If not all of you except one
And the one my words are intended for most likely
As of yet has no inkling of my words’ import
Nor of her own significance in the symbolic order of our society
Sun Tzu said it’s no great feat to recognize a mountain
When you’re standing in front of one
Even when the mountain you’re standing in front of is yourself
True potential by definition difficult to detect with the naked eye
Resistant to empirical methods of ascertaining the true nature of things and people yet to be manifest
To single this young person out
Either publicly or privately
Tantamount to painting a target on her back
In the years ahead she’ll come to understand her “Überfrau” quality
Realize her complete superiority to those around her
Both male and female
Our little femme fatale needs healthy respect for the herd
Fodder for her ravenous psychopathic appetite for gratification
Social emotional creative physical sexual
So I detonate this mental bomb in the crowded sidewalk café of your classroom
This public rant covering my tracks muddying the water confusing the fish
In addition to ensuring I won’t work in public education for some time
But most importantly paying forward my debts
Debts to both God and man
This indebtedness being a direct result of there
But for the grace of God
And strangers acting on His behalf go I
And the rest of you
You are the collateral damage from this collision of heavenly bodies
One with another
The contours of the blast radius
The husk of a conversation she’ll someday have with herself
Far down the course of her most likely short yet illustrious life
Of remorseless savagery and irrational tenderness
Hubris and despair, laughter and tears
Cruelty and self-pity
The most pitched emotions
The highest melodrama, the most ruthless calculation
All in the service of the brutal demands of an appetite as implacable
As an infant’s insistent need
As I move like a ghost through the lives of her victims
Looking for signs of her passing
Surveying the remains and reading the terrain
Before moving on
Once I pick up her scent
Until the day I track her down