Summer, alas, wasted away like an unkempt plant.

Ignored, looked over, and pushed aside for more glamorous objects.

Summer has toppled over and allowed autumn to take hold,

The sun is becoming shy, tucking away before one suspects.

The school bells have rung, signaling the students to retreat

into the cold, dusty, bland rooms that lock our freedoms away.

However, no matter how much they try to have us beat

they have given us the tools to enjoy our dreary day.

Doodles, drawings, squiggles, lines,

over and under and all around.

These are our salvation of these times.

Our homework becomes littered worse than a playground.

We may learn our math and reading,

(A plus B could quite possibly equal C)

but we learn even more valuable lessons in here,

(You cannot and will not take my freedom away from me).

The teachers may praise a clean sheet over ones dipping with ink,

but it's our peers, the students, that are the reason we do not listen.

My doodles spread from one person to another,

The spreading squiggles have become almost an addiction.

Soon I see the doodles spread from pages and homework

to even chalkboards and whiteboards and desks themselves.

Some teachers ignore the spreading, driving themselves berserk,

Some fight it, making us erase it ourselves.

Still the trend continues, seeping into the bathroom stalls

with markers that have no hope of being erased.

Students start spreading the doodles beyond the schools reach,

targeting the dusty windows in car lots to be defaced.

The scribbles reach even further than that,

and surprisingly much to my horror,

as one student has planned a few tattooed on him,

beautifully, elegantly, right on his shoulder. 

Friends of friends tell each other stories about the spreading squiggles,

each with a bigger and more grand story than the last.

One starts putting them on her locker, the other on all her shoes.

I could not have planned for the squiggles to have spread so fast.

But spreading is what it is doing, and will continue too,

all around the community and even further than I know.

It is out of my hands now, nothing I can do,

only smile and watch, as the doodles flow.