Hi waltz,

I rather think you're overreacting here -- understandably so given your many-layered Catholic context, but I don't think you've made your case against the poem. Rather, I think the fact that Grosel doesn't try to hone his metaphors too finely against the deeper context of Catholicism or Catholic school is a virtue, not a vice. For whatever reason, he takes the point of view of an outsider to that context looking in, and takes his little parable no farther than he and his fellow outsiders can understand that context. So much the better, I say -- it keeps the poem from being what so many of the Tuesday Poems so obviously are (blatantly pretentious).

Let me take an angle on this poem from my own experience in a parallel area. There has been a rumor going around for decades (literally) that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" is actually a metaphorical commentary on my own religious context as it existed when the song was written. In a biographical paperback on Led Zeppelin that I once skimmed, the claim is made that the song really reflects the famous old book The Faerie Queene, but there are exactly two lines in the song that would fit that context with any precision. All the others -- some very strikingly so -- fit my religious context (and/or how outsiders perceived it) and nothing else in the popular culture of the time. The song is an outsider's point of view on a deep context, but you don't see me overreacting to it or its flagrant misrepresentations of some of that context. Mostly I find them amusing. That probably explains most of my self-restraint; it's hard for me to hate what I find hilarious.

At least this poem -- and here I speak as a fellow outsider to your own world! -- doesn't seem to be too flagrant in its overgeneralizations. It would benefit from thinking some of them through more -- if laziness is involved, then really it lies in stopping with the second draft when one or two more drafts would've done the trick. I think the basic idea of the poem is sound and worth following through.

And perhaps strangely enough from your point of view, I have no trouble connecting emotionally with either the Catholic-school imagery or the D&D imagery, even though I am such a decided outsider to both worlds. (Maybe it's because being an outsider, I can see the forest in spite of the trees.) Connecting with a ten-year-old's awakening sexuality (something beginning to overcome even a ten-year-old's love of gaming) is somethng I have no trouble with at all, and to me it is by far the most charming part of the poem.

For what it's worth,
wr ()()