I Am The Dust That Quivers From The Words

Colossal walls, a catacomb. Bleached cage
of dust with prints
Of children’s fingers on the windows.
Where chalk drew words out of my mouth.
Scrapes on the blackboard, shrieking tells me
to shut forever up
More quiet than existing undiscovered
Where no one wants to be
In lethargy
This is what I’ve learned of the

School. What was I doing there? I remember scent
Of always just geraniums – red leaves on window-sills;
I hear the closing of green doors and fire fills
A furnace that my right cheek
Swelters. I see a bucket filled with coals
that vomits horse’s eyes in metal maws
That pant and moan like predators

There where I rose. Ruined towards the inside
Of what a cosmos was. Maroon inferno –
I am the ash.

I smell a wooden table, wax, the inkpot filled
with stories, once. And see, a brush and some pink paint;
the worthless gifts that teachers do present
And which I never earned by dreaming
To coast away from so much lack of meaning
Since I was so inefficient

I see her shoulders, there, a sapphire gentle bridge;
two blonde pigtails.
I see the hair of my best friend return
in my mind’s eye. So breakable

I hear the echo of her laughter drowning in the slowly bell.
My God, it sounds like shrieking in an everlasting hell
And I who wasn’t authorized to leave, but stay
Where no one wants to be
A child like me

sat stationary in that catacomb
Not doing anything that did come close to living
So that she had to leave for home
Where until now the tormenting goes on
Because she couldn’t get there on her own

And in the afternoon an empty place
That fills her up since then
I am not free. As well in me she is
a daily near to be.

The teacher spoke, his face in agony,
to all the children of our class
while just to me,
“a weighty combination drove her dead.”

School. You live in me and I in you was driven mad.
Behind your eyes the sky can be at times a pale
or blue statuette.
I am in that place to stay
Where no one wants to be
drenched in me. That bottomless
cemetery
of ash
Where I am not,
and neither was,
but task.

I am the dust that quivers from the words
That never discontinues with convincing us
without a sight. Year in, year out,
in ranks of captured light.