Year eleven
English class, you’d sit in front of
me, unaware I could hear
your pencil, scribbling
throughts you scrapped
when we all wrote poems.
The back of your neck would
flush angry red
as you tried to cram rhymes
against their will, into
stunted couplets.
You hated free verse (well,
most poetry, at that).
“It should have rules,”
you’d argue with
the teacher, trying to
derive the lexical formula
through some slip of her tongue,
convinced she was
safeguarding the key
to composition, or at least to
the coveted A.
I sat behind you,
sadly, seeing unborn poems
slip between your fingers,
trickle down the legs of your desk
and settle with resignation in the wastebasket.
I said nothing;
I sighed, and penned
a poem you’d hate
about all the ones you threw away.