Student Mauricio

English as a second language
Rebounding off his inner ears and around his brain.
The words enter easily enough like drunk horses riding toward a river
and not stopping to save themselves from drowning.
The deep water is not a lack of understanding the sudden rocks
and waterfalls are not a learning deficiency, no portuguese is the river.
The drunken horses splash into the water going under or injuring themselves on rocks
Some of them manage to get to the other side "his brain"!
While a few of the horses go under and lose their existance
Now the horses have arrived in his brain and are sober and shiny now
Mauricio puts saddles on them and grooms them well,
once in a while he gets up on them and rides them into a conversation
sometimes he falls off when the hooves of the horse begin to gallop.
He feeds the horses monday to thursday with teacher´s grain and grass.
It´s not quite enough to maintain the poor beasts and they end up eating the grass
that´s already growing on the side of the river, great clumps of portuguese grass
that confuses the horses and makes them ride wonky like.
Mauricio called his horses to attention with his rock music that fought it´s way
through his ear drum across the river and to where the horses were grazing.
This helped alittle bit, but what they needed was some real training and some good food
That mauricio could give them by doing his homework.
Of course the word homework tried to enter into Mauricios inner ear but his brains
own UFC fighters were called onto to knock it out of his vocabulary forever.
So the horses had difficulty getting faster and riding well and each conversation
meant the brain had to compensate for the information that was missing or
misinterpreted. The end result was coherent but wishy washy.
There were some really strong sober english horses in mauricios brain now
and even though their diet wasn´t perfect and they needed more training
they could ride.
Though Mauricio dreamed of racing one of the english horses to be a champion
and felt guilty that perhaps he could be doing alot more to make his horses "Perfect"
so he started to do his homework and extra study.
At first the horses would only perform during a canter pronouncing each stride well enough
But then something miraculous happened the horses galloped from his portuguese thinking mind
into his mouth to speak perfect english.