He lay, but once he writhed.

Most people, by nature of the failed public education system, no doubt, are simply unfamiliar with, or, perhaps, even incapable of the clever come-back. But then most people grew up without the rapt attention of one's own personal historian.

I, however, was fortunate. At birth, I was assigned to the care of both a historian and a literary scholar, who most people know as my parents.

While other children played baseball on warm summer nights, I joined my tutors for bouts of "Duelling Bards" as we used to call it, attempting to call the other out as harshly and rudely as possible employing only monologues and sonets from Shakespeare's pre-London works (you know, before he became all commercial and sold-out to the sponsors).

These duels presented such a stimulating experience that I would often fall into bed well before eight o'clock, when my parents said the electricity in my room would stop working to conserve energy for the starving kids in Ethiopia. Most of the people in my school lived in a different city altogether from mine -- one that did not, I had assumed, have the necessary grid connections to conserve energy to feed the poor.

I became quite skilled in the vile retort. Over the next several years, schoolmates would try to tease me. They tried and failed? They tried and died. My clever prose would quickly reduce them to tears. Clever as they were, they might have fooled the rest of the students into thinking they were just laughing at me, but I knew better. The bullied had become the bully, and the lashes from my tongue cut deep.

Of course I allowed them to maintain an outward posture of control and dominance, but only because I knew inside they were devastated. They must be after the thorough beatings I would, their egos, give. Today, I think their guilt over not helping the Ethiopians played no small role.

Come to think of it, I should ask my parents to show me the photos of the children we fed by saving so much electricity. It'd be good to have something positive to reflect upon when I'm feeling betrayed and alone, which I have set aside all day Tuesday for, exclusively, and the latter half of alternating Fridays.

Of course it wasn't until well after I had graduated high school that I realized how much more effective my retorts might have been if I had actually said them aloud.

So good was I at "Duelling Bards" that not once during the decade of abuse I might have otherwise endured, did any of my opponents, be they alone or as a troop, dare to quote Great William S., or compete at all—save for the occassional clever utterance in the low-tongue they embraced as Speech.

Mr. Sjeordsma taught that class. Speech. I gave a funeral for a worm, laid upon a bed of cotton in a watch box laid, open-casket style, near the door to the classroom. Good times.

He lay, but once he writhed.
[Just like those kids at school.]
One day we will all join him,
and in the neverafter
see what great damage
might be done with knowledge.

Stay in school, kids.