School (Automatic poem)
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By well-wisher
- 6054 reads
my misery;
a time table crushed and torn;
each dirty tear, a new subject of pain.
The blackboard of tarmac
and chalk of my face.
in which I am hopelessly lost;
the mountain of pavements
and corridoors;
the jungle of bodies; their landslide to school;
its current of kicking and shoving and tripping
that hack their way through me as I trudge on
and rivers of spittle that run down my spine;
that shatter my pangean heart
into small, lonely islands
of misery
and fear.
the knuckled punctuation marks,
pronounced with crunch of hawked up spit;
spittle calligraphy writing out hate
upon me
and a vocabulary of racist slurs
until I knew my proper name
and to reply with
silence.
the calculated blows;
names repeated like tables;
the subtraction of self confidence;
the addition of scars
or piling up of punches
and long division of my heart
till my head was like a hard sum
and only a fraction
of me
remained.
how to keep my head down low;
how to roll myself into a ball;
how to go numb at the sound of laughter;
how to be a football and a punchbag
and get used to falling
and falling on my
face.
engraved in me like hearts in a desk,
that forget them, I never will;
that they strangle me still like an old school tie;
make my face a uniform of fear;
fear that rings inside me like a school bell
so till this day I have not grown inside;
so till this day I still have nightmares
about school.
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Comments
this is very well written and
this is very well written and so sad
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Very moving.
Beautifully written. Makes you feel so much for the child then and the child who still remains.
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Sad and evocative, this
Sad and evocative, this brilliantly moving poem is our Facebook and Twitter Pick of the Day. Please share/retweet if you've enjoyed it too.
Picture: https://tinyurl.com/y9ap3m7r
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Hard hitting. Brutal isn't it
Hard hitting. Brutal isn't it? what we make our children endure. why "automatic poem"?
well done on the pick of the day, more than deserved!
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What a wonderful poem! Well
What a wonderful poem! Well done.
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I think this has struck a
I think this has struck a chord with all of us. It's very clever, seems well thought out even though you say it's automatic. I sometimes think that so many children are unhappy in school and aren't aware that each other is. It can be a cruel training ground, with overlarge classes and everyone trying to survive. I wouldn't go back to school!
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Great stuff, well-wisher.
Great stuff, well-wisher. Many kids suffer and are scarred for life by their school experience. I like the idea of automatic writing technique. Creating at the cusp of conscious thought. Like snatching it out of the sky. It worked well here.
Parson Thru
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A truly hellish set of
A truly hellish set of memories. Glad you lived to tell the tale.
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This beautiful and heart
This beautiful and heart-rending poem has struck a chord with many readers, and it's our Poem of the Week. Congratulations!
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You are an amazing person to
You are an amazing person to have grown up into the wonderful, inventive, funny, satirical writer you are and not bitter and soul shrivelled from suffering so much
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