they made us read kafka
without preamble or warning
or so much as a breath in the direction of a foreward
no prologue
no anatomy of a cockroach
they made us read kafka
and in my final essay, I swore that he was a crazy nut
who slept outside in a cardboard box
underneath the 110 freeway
in downtown Los Angeles with the rest of his
former existentialists
who turned men into insects
and arrested innocents.
they made us read kafka
and wrestle with his unfinished stories,
essays
novels
social commentary...
graduated, resigned, bitter
we left kafka and all that behind
with the half-assed essays of high school honors english