one thousand secret kings

I got into exactly one fistfight in high school, when I was a freshman. And then I didn't need to anymore.
On our school bus, the cool kids sat in the back. The losers sat in the front. The football team sat in the back; I sat in the front.
One day I got to the after-school bus late. All the seats up front were taken, but there was one on the border between cool-land and un-cool-land that wasn't taken. I scrambled into this seat, books spilling out of my backpack, out of breath, glasses...

Freezing fog???
Where have I moved? Oh god.

The water has to be precisely the right temperature. Too hot, and it will kill the yeast. Too cold, and the yeast will never wake. I've mostly got the hang of it now, but once in a while I still screw up the proof, and I have to throw everything out...

Hm. I guess I've just never thought of Charles Simic as "a surrealist with a dark view." There's a kind of hollow loneliness expressed in a lot of his writing, I suppose, but his wintery dreamworld isn't a dark place. It's exuberant and ultimately, irredeemably...