age 11, reading e.e. cummings

I ask the teacher:

Why can e. defy the rule of grammar?

"Creative license", she said.

Wow! Even as a kid I understood

that kind of power

to rebel against the Capitol

to punctuate any order

to choose, full stop

I only wanted to know:

How could I get one too?

in the word world of children

language is everything

but all the pallets of grey

take years to unpack

like how

an incision is a fresh wound

painful and bled in the same vein

and a smile is mostly incisors

I used to think the home-less were house-less

not slept away in a second story

where the boarded up windows keep

the idea of people out

tucked beneath worn blankets

and torn sleeping bags

and more discarded

wrappers

a general man told me,

"when you wage war,

  you must expect some

  collateral damage"

but never spoke about how

through the gaps in the gable,

like a lapse in a fable,

the unseen still see

the same snow fill, up

the old spruce hill

where professors obstruct

a pure structural view

"in the word world of children

  language is everything"

it is so obvious to those

who eat the food that mothers cook

and never once, either

foolish or stubborn

tasted poison