After the last class of the year - after the bell that never rang, and after the moderate riot of locker mayhem in hallways without enough garbage bins, I came home to this room and munched Cheez-Its™, reading for a few minutes Merton (who just happened to be at hand because I had no mail worth reading - and who may have become for me a kind of oracle not unlike the I-Ching) who tells me, "Being and doing become one, in our life, when our life and being themselves are a 'martyrdom' for the truth."

"I don't need this," I mutter to the invisible cat who is the adequate symbol for my soul and close the book just after "We cannot escape the obligation to deny ourselves" and reach for another crispy cheezy cracker.

My self-denial will take the form of time spent soon (when? tomorrow, not tonight) in processing piles of paper I collected this week when way too much came due. Poor planning. Lack of foresight. A personal flaw that keeps me from claiming the title some desperate, funny scholar scrawled on the board: "Br. Tom is God." Just think, deprived of divinity by a calendar fault. I can live with it. And this is another form of self-denial I am happy to embrace.

I was happy to play a song today, recorded by one of my students, Sean, who drums in The Tuff Enuff Blues Band. As the third element of his poetry project, he (and the band) delivered "Hunger in New York" by Simon Ortiz over Eric Clapton's "Oh Love". And it worked. The singer sang it true in a wonderful raspy growly Tom Waits mumble (lyric sheet required). The band never dropped it, rose and fell in the best places. Perfect emphasis, breaks, and repetition. I didn't think it would work so well. Goes to show what I know. The song honors the poem, lifts it up into a world we can know. And the poem-song honors the players - and a kid who thought they could do it. And did.