The Schoolbus Graveyard

In which a former school bus driver laments the deterioration of education in America. This poem was inspired by a fleeting image, glimpsed for just a second on a train ride back to NYC from Boston about five years ago. That the idea has stayed with me this long, and finally emerged from the dark caverns of my memory in the form of this bleak poem, is a testament to what a powerful image it was. The "graveyard" was little more than a narrow strip of land, maybe 100 feet wide, crowded between the tracks and a filthy, gated pond of some sort. It was filled with about 100 abandoned broken-down, rusted-out schoolbuses, the yellow kind we all rode once as children. I finally was inspired to resurrect this image and immortalize it in this poem after reading Brendan Burford's account of the "Tugboat Graveyard" in Staten Island in Syncopated volume 3.