Zero
Nothing gets nothing, Lear tells the daughter
who’s too goody-goody to give him the lie
his plaqued-up brain craves , and pretty soon
he’s homeless in a black night all shivery wet
acold in some serious British weather
and everyone who’s good gets killed or hung
while venal tyrants destroy each other
and the country—and whose fault is that
but hers, I wrote for Professor Walter King
who gave me a zero on my Lit paper
for the wrong answer since his honesty
was intractable and unlike other professors
he cared nothing for being popular.
Though alphabet letters like Fs and Ds
replete with minuses suffixed to them
were not unusual on my schoolwork,
this crimson zero business was a brand new
feature and all day as I did my dull day
under the brooding brown mountain
slashed by its giant white M, I murmured it,
“zero, zed, zip,” and, since in those days
we now call “the day” we talked questions
over elbow to elbow in cave-like bars
where shadows flitted across flashing
beer displays, rather than asking a robot Sybil
for answers on ever-twiddled phones,
I brought it up how we always say Oh
for zero when I went to get drunk
with cowboys and Indians and poets
at Eddie’s Club, like my phone number
as a kid was 4-oh-663, never 0
on that whizzing dial, and for my paper
on Othello I claimed the Star character
was Iago, like Satan in Milton, and so
on, because Professor King was dead right
about my work for school; I cared not one
fat zero for answers grades made right,
and the sooner the whipping we all deserve
commences the better for us all
lest in righteousness we make our losses
the nothing we make from nothing.
who’s too goody-goody to give him the lie
his plaqued-up brain craves , and pretty soon
he’s homeless in a black night all shivery wet
acold in some serious British weather
and everyone who’s good gets killed or hung
while venal tyrants destroy each other
and the country—and whose fault is that
but hers, I wrote for Professor Walter King
who gave me a zero on my Lit paper
for the wrong answer since his honesty
was intractable and unlike other professors
he cared nothing for being popular.
Though alphabet letters like Fs and Ds
replete with minuses suffixed to them
were not unusual on my schoolwork,
this crimson zero business was a brand new
feature and all day as I did my dull day
under the brooding brown mountain
slashed by its giant white M, I murmured it,
“zero, zed, zip,” and, since in those days
we now call “the day” we talked questions
over elbow to elbow in cave-like bars
where shadows flitted across flashing
beer displays, rather than asking a robot Sybil
for answers on ever-twiddled phones,
I brought it up how we always say Oh
for zero when I went to get drunk
with cowboys and Indians and poets
at Eddie’s Club, like my phone number
as a kid was 4-oh-663, never 0
on that whizzing dial, and for my paper
on Othello I claimed the Star character
was Iago, like Satan in Milton, and so
on, because Professor King was dead right
about my work for school; I cared not one
fat zero for answers grades made right,
and the sooner the whipping we all deserve
commences the better for us all
lest in righteousness we make our losses
the nothing we make from nothing.
