Credentialed teams of specialists
Review the troubled student lists.
The ratio is eight-to-one:
Master degrees to restless son.
Endless action-steps prescribed,
Services offered, or denied…
Recent to their foster-nation,
Parents need interpretation.
Data-driven milquetoasts mild
Converge upon the clueless child,
Whose PPT drags on forever;
Second hands begin to sever
Time from minutes, hope from haste
(Student-centered, outcome-based).

Pretending to follow Prompt #2:

write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory.
Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then,
something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Bark like a rooster, roar like a chicken
Fake those healings till we sicken;
Churchy frenzies, righteous quavers—
Charismaniacs and ravers.
Holy laughs from Howie Browne
Lame libations: drink it down
Until you sprawl on the temple floor
searching for God’s own unlocked door.

Tulsa, OK named and claimed it
then prophetically explained it:
Ken and Gloria invested—
slick, convincing, uncontested.
Pretty-boy preachers wowed the flock,
making Christ the laughing stock;
their best lives, yielding heresies:
out-phariseeing Pharisees—
as if their western cowboy drawls
could bless impulsive bank withdrawals.
Peculiar to the U.S.A.
where truth is prophesied away
and churches spring like tares and breed
while tele-preachers intercede
for breakthroughs, blessings, Mammon’s gold,
their folly long ago foretold
in frenzied tones; the healing tongue
counts dollars where Paul counted dung.
I’m sure they all believe it’s true . . .
they know it justifies fleecing you.

False form of Christianity:
American insanity.
Dispensing what’s unorthodox
To their low-information flocks,
Preachers rant from outer space
Extorting tithes, with glowing face.
Exhorting stubborn sheep and goats
To sow that seed in higher notes.
Media-promoted freakshow,
Beamed by satellite. Here below
We observe their bald expansions:
Buying Lear jets, yachts, new mansions . . .
Something in that Tulsa water
Fattens up these calves for slaughter
While they prattle, Okie-style,
Preaching from the Book of Vile.
Empire-building in tailored suits . . .
Its time to judge them by their fruits.