Schoolboy poem

a poem about going to school in England, about being a teenager in England, about the way coffee makes you really self consciousness about releasing breath from between your lips

College used to start at like ten past nine

and I’d always be home by six. 
We sat about s**t-talking each other in the mornings,
we never needed a reason to, or any motivation:
our friendships simply took malice as their predicate,
as entire ecosystems all vied to be king.
I would spend lunchtime in my friends’ cars
with coffee breath, spilt tobacco on my lap,
and this raw desperado emotion breaking up
in my eyes: “I hate this place,” they went,
though my friend hated it much more than I did,
because, really, I was just in denial about everything, hammered
into a ballet of teen angst pirouetting upon violence.
I didn’t mind it really, some of it, most of it.
While he plain hated it. Plain hated it. 
The classrooms stank of loathing.
Nobody wanted to be there really, did they?
Though everybody was, always was,
as our generation after the generations before us
committed one fifth of their life to
blackboard scratches, the cloakroom, 
the school toilets without any soap that they didn’t want to be in.
When my friend thought he’d become sick, though,
he wouldn’t shut up about how lucky
we’d been, how fortunate we’d been, how -
but, no. Lucky wasn’t enough for us English kids.

Nothing was.

Reviews

[Plitman_728]

In love! I feel the raw, kicking objection, the cold stench of chalk and engines running in the parking lot, the "wanting to get away". You are brilliant.