Today in school, the same as yesterday,

and the day before, and the day before the day before,

Come in all humdrum and tired,

not even slapped awake by the slippy sippy slurp of black mustard coffee on the way to work,

Get used to the schedule for the rest of your lives,

get up, get to work, get back home, no surprise,

get swamped, get pushed 'til you're dull,

get broken by the slow steady line of your pencil's scrawl,

Put your name at the top,

Put the answers below,

Vomit your mind's retentions,

to show you've paid your attentions,

Go home, do homework, go to bed,

and don't do anything in your head,

write it down, turn it in,

to be lost to its doom, within the teacher's chagrin,

Embarrassed, you, their student, got a head of them,

to the shredder it goes, all marked up in red ink pen,

It was over their heads don't you see?

This zone is not to fly in 'cept for crashing real messy,

They'll point their pens and cross their fingers,

to insure nothing but mediocrity lingers,

They'd rather see pricks in your arms, or cavities on your teeth,

than for you to beat them and their bachelors degrees,

Fire beaten and besmothered, my suffocated soul limps home,

to write this truthful and woe filled poem,

to fill my heart's hole of hellish dread,

with new lumber and sparks instead,

'til the smoke grows too thick,

and I know what I wrote they'll never read,

for it is my own ambitions that lie on this paper and bleed!