School  (Automatic poem)

Gold cherry
Poem of the week

By well-wisher

Sat, 25 Nov 2017
  • 6363 reads
16 comments
 
I unfold my memory;
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.
 
Firstly the geography
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.
 
Then languages;
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.
 
Next maths;
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.
 
Then P.E.;
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.
 
And all these things are taught so well;
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.
Certificate U
Poem
Miscellaneous

Comments

Submitted by Insertponceyfre... on

this is very well written and so sad 

 

Submitted by airyfairy on

Beautifully written.   Makes you feel so much for the child then and the child who still remains.

 

Submitted by well-wisher on

Thank you, airyfairy. Glad you liked it.

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn

Submitted by well-wisher on

Thank you, insert.

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn

Submitted by airyfairy on

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

Submitted by well-wisher on

Thank you for making me pick of the day. It's made my day. Thank you.

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn

Submitted by shoe on

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!

 

Submitted by well-wisher on

Thanks, shoe. It's one reason that I've always loved William Goldings "Lord Of The Flies".  Part of the problem, I think is that adults like to idealize childhood/adolescence and forget or are maybe just in denial about how brutal it can be.

An automatic poem is a stream of consciousness poem; an outpouring and, although I preplanned the structure of this poem, the rest just kind of flowed out.

 

 

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn

Submitted by Philip Sidney on

What a wonderful poem!  Well done.

Submitted by catherine poarch on

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! 

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

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

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

A truly hellish set of memories. Glad you lived to tell the tale.

Submitted by YaseminB on

extraordinary and heartbreaking at times. 

Yasemin Balandi

Submitted by celticman on

sorrowful but true. 

 

Submitted by airyfairy on

This beautiful and heart-rending poem has struck a chord with many readers, and it's our Poem of the Week.  Congratulations!

Submitted by Di_Hard on

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