Some of My Closets\u00a0\u00a0 (Poem 12)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jewish kid who just wanted to fit in like probably every other kid.<\/p>\n
Philly streets of cement, priest telling my friends not to play with me.<\/p>\n
Nuns kicking me out of the gym for obvious reasons.<\/p>\n
Why did I have to be different?<\/p>\n
My closet thought was, Why can\u2019t we be like everyone else?<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Being a pre-dental student in college was to keep me from getting drafted<\/p>\n until I could come out of the closet when a safe draft lottery number made<\/p>\n we immune to the draft. Any real desire to be a dentist disappeared in<\/p>\n about a half second or less. A college art teacher had looked me in the eye<\/p>\n and asked if I really wanted to be a dentist. I lied to both her and myself by<\/p>\n answering yes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then opening a chiropractic office in Coeur d\u2019Alene, Idaho \u2013 infamous for the<\/p>\n Aryan Nations White Supremacists put me back in my original closet. \u201cSchwartz,<\/p>\n is that German Doc?\u201d was a common question. My true but elusive answer was<\/p>\n that it\u2019s Russian (now Ukrainian and Lithuanian). But Jews were murdered there<\/p>\n for their religion and thus my grandfather came here alone as a teen.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And after all those years of hiding, I no longer have any skin in the game and so<\/p>\n it\u2019s with great pleasure that I make it a point to always tell the truth. And maybe I<\/p>\n pretend to myself that I always did. Or if I don\u2019t for some reason, I\u2019m an expert at<\/p>\n telling enough of a half-truth that no one notices but me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I notice that my clothes closet is always neat and clean with color coded clothes.<\/p>\n Maybe I want that because I\u2019ve spent so much time in there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of My Closets\u00a0\u00a0 (Poem 12) Jewish kid who just wanted to fit in like probably every other kid. Philly streets of cement, priest telling my friends not to play with me. Nuns kicking me out of the gym for obvious reasons. Why did…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136886,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136870\/revisions\/136886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}