a name is a label/that may not carry any other burdensome weight/nor cause us to prejudge/but is that ever true?
my parents named me gary after a hitchhiking drummer/my middle name is wright which is a family name on my mother’s side/rumor has it my last name came from peeblesshire on the border between scotland and england
in the seventh grade in room 55 they called me mr. g. bowers/to distinguish me from classmate chuck bauer
another grade-school classmate/has an odd form of glossolalia/and he has called me at least a thousand different names/in the last 61 years
“bongo” and “nahblotz” and “bigby” and such
but the one that stuck with our circle of friends is the definite article followed by the first syllable of my name
“the bow”
rhymes with now and chow and how
sometimes i spell it b’ao
and sometimes i say “when the b’ao breaks/the cradle will fall”
just to be strange
One with Clay, Image and Text 