7th Period Spanish
Location
"Who said you can't live forever lied-
Of course, I'll live on, forever I'll, forever I will
Live on.
You can't ever deny my flaws.
I'll live on forever, I'll forever.."
Live in the crevices
Between the cracks in my sanity
And the faults in my character;
You put me on Death Row
Everytime you sent me to the back of the room
With that wretched desk,
And 7 crude letters carved into the wood
By previous inmates spelling out
QUIT NOW.
You've iscolated me from the rest of society
And turned me into nothing much more
Than a prisoner.
I would just like to know what my crime was -
Was it because I flipped upside down the statistics
That said I had absolutely no chance
Of making it to where I stand today,
Which murdered the obscured conception you had
Of that "one ghetto kid" at the back of the class
That somehow snuck himself
Into all of the college prep classes,
Because it couldn't possibly be
That I was something different
Than you thought,
Or was it because of my missed court dates?
Seemingly impossible questions
That you wanted to judge me by
That I somehow answered;
Vindictive attempts at you trying to push me
With the ice cold shoulder
That left me frozen every time your eyes focused on me in class.
You dehumanized 26 of us
Until we dared not question our dictator;
You single-handedly turned this hollowed classroom
Into a concentration camp gas chamber,
You've irrigated your cotton fields with the blood
Of enslaved students who would rather see red drops
Clank against their bathroom sink
Than be in your class,
You've left us trembling in our nuke chambers
Waiting for the next bombs that you will drop.
I'm sitting in solitary confinement,
Hoping that one day, I will get to stand once again
As a human.
So, Miss -
The next time I raise my hands,
Do not take it as a surrender of arms,
But rather as an appeal
Against all the charges you have pressed against me.
You told me
That I was the worst student you have ever taught,
That you hope I will one day have to deal with someone as terrible as me,
That you give up on me, and probably should have earlier,
That you GIVE UP.
I just asked you to teach.
I'm going to school to become a High School English teacher.
Maybe with you teaching Spanish,
We had a miscommuniction in interests -
I SWORE our mission as teachers
Was to mold and shape the next wave of the world,
But you would rather prod and rip apart egos
For the benefit of yours -
Us students are just trying to be the best that we could possible embody
But you would rather strap shackles to ankles, trapping chaingangs of zombies
Wandering through the halls after teachers like you
Have killed off any hopes they ever had
Of being something one day.
I don't see why you flaunt around
Your little Master's degree
If they never taught you how to put compassion
Into your curriculum.
So to the teacher
Who has perpetually changed
My insecurities into realities -
I thank you.
For if I did not have someone like you around
To show me exactly what not to be,
I might have become that piece of shit
You always thought I was.