The System

Don't you hear me?! I'm sitting here screaming at you with my eyes! Trying to tell you who I am, but you wont listen. You don't know what I can do, I can paint you the universe with my fingertips, dripping with stars but the wells have run dry. No one to appreciate the crimsen pigment flowing in highways throughout my form.

Can't you see me?! I'm sitting here on fire and you walk by as if the limbs of smoke don't burn your lungs. You walk past me, unnoticed as I sit- screaming, on fire. How can you not notice that I'm breaking and already broken? I'm loud, but unspoken, I'm burning but distinguished. I'm here but you don't see me. 

If you would listen, I could speak a thousand thoughts in one word. I would try to show you the beauty of vocabulary- that the dictionary is a love story waiting to be written.

But I go unappreciated, so I'll sit here with screaming eyes, body on fire with my lungs filled with a thousand breathes waiting to tell you my story.

Maybe I could teach you something, public school teacher. Your lessons teach me how to calculate the mass of a triangle, but can you calculate the mass of my heart? And do the holes make my heart lighter, or is it heavier because I seem to always feel weighted down? Can you show me the difference between right and wrong and how I should make decisions? Because I'm tired of learning from the mistakes in my history textbooks.

My backpack feels so heavy, pulling my shoulders backward, dragging me down along with my freedom. I'm trapped inside concrete walls, frosted windows; it feels like a prison. You try to shove equations and vocabulary words down my throat, in hopes that somehow I'll be able to regurgitate the information back onto the ever-so-important standardized tests.

Greying in bubbles on answer documents instead of setting my fingers free to do as they please- drawing and writing poetry. I'm not learning this way and there is so much I want to say. 

Why don't you sit down while I whip out my expo marker and teach you for a change?