By Jackie Chou
Leave the sleazy lights of the city,
and do your homework.
Forget the rye fields.
The children on the cliffs
will be chaperoned by their parents,
and the ones who do fall
will more likely be missed
than being caught.
For every hero
offering his arms,
there will be a crowd
standing around watching,
doing nothing.
Knowing you,
you would not like
the phoniness of it all.
Jackie Chou is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee whose poem Formosa was a finalist in the 2023 Stephen A DiBiase Poetry Prize. She has numerous poems published by Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest inspired by the late great Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, and others. Her two collections of poetry, Finding My Heart in Love and Loss and the Sorceress, published by cyberwit in 2023, can be purchased on Amazon.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 