The New York City Department of Education wants to avoid the user of certain words or phrases on standardized tests if “the topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation; the topic has been overused in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students; the topic appears biased against (or toward) some group of people.” The list of the words and phrases is below. I suggest reading it aloud — it sounds like Beat poetry! -David Pescovitz
O New York City Board of Education who nothing that matters,
drying our hard-scrabble minds in your breathless hot wind,
blowing out the savage stars of our imagination—
Violence against the word! Terrorism!
Run away to your monster homes with swimming pools,
your gated community birthdays with expensive gifts,
pornography, fake rainbows and whale aquariums.
We’re children dealing with serious issues,
give us this day our guns, our knives, our nuclear weapons.
It’s evolution, my brothers and sisters,
our hunting instinct passed from the ancient hairy apes
bids us prowl the crowded midnight markets
to search out junk food, politics and sex.
What is Rock-and-Roll? Notes on a blackboard!
Go rock us, rap us, roll us, O celebrities,
into the war and bloodshed,
into the daily catastrophes of our bodily functions.
Roam this featureless tundra of dead images,
abandoned animal shelters for rats and roaches.
Only vermin can survive the traumatic material.
Drugs may abuse our substance but never our holy unbroken spirit,
they welcome us into their ecstatic religious festivals,
alcohol sits in a sports bar playing video games,
takes a deep drag on a tobacco cigarette
and brags of Fergus Muir’s 375-foot putt.
Everybody’s sign is Cancer!
Celebrate your divorce with vacations and prizes,
Computers in the home lie in wait with your five-foot televisions
to sell your eyes into slavery and oblivion.
Gambling for money is no crime, it’s living,
money for gambling is a disease with no cure.
Be homeless this Hallowe’en, for poverty, too, is an occult topic,
go find first-hand the meaning of sorcery and witchcraft.
Every day dead souls are taking their no-name holidays.
Religion stuffs our missions with goners and shrieks
mad prophecies of death and heaven from rooftop gardens,
while fortune-telling is against the law.
Loss of employment is our only salvation.
You can steal but you can’t read our minds,
our magic parapsychology will outrun your zombie psychology,
the revolution will not be standardized.
This star-crazed night and forever we’re an angel army,
wanting, desiring, dancing high and loud above your streets of wasted shadows!