High School, Revisited

Poem (audio)

Photo by kyo azuma on Unsplash

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FULL AUDIO WITH PAID SUB!

Best thing about high school
was leaving it behind – wasn’t it?
Yet...we can’t leave it
well enough alone.
We go back to it,
and revisit it
time after time again—
and not just by flipping the thick,
waxed pages of the yearbook

And high school won’t leave us alone.
with Its deafening reverb of school bells
of zero period to 6^th period
in dreams— no, nightmares!
End-of-recess whistles still bum us out.
High school still haunts us
How does it keep having us think
we forgot to do or turn in
a homework assignment?

High school is a specter
not a friendly one like Casper,
It keeps having us
following foolish illusions
year after year…
to be cool, to clout chase,
to push ourselves to be popular
among our peers
above everything else

Fears, fears, fears
High school dregs ‘em up
giving us sweaty palms
to speak up,
do a presentation
in front of piercing eyeballs,
even trepidation
to raise our hand,
and eek up courage to speak up

Tears, Tears, Tears
High School dregs up
old awkwardness
and insecurity
about our bodies
in puberty,
being left out
in class, recess
or snubbed from the club

But ...we keep High School alive
with our incessant juvey chatterings
and obsessions about
the most trivial of things;
gossiping; immature jesters,
teasing and worse,
bullying others
it’s a disgrace now
just as it was in class

Oh...we love hanging onto high school glory
still sporting our letterman jacket
or letting it hang and be close to reach;
still hanging on to the glory
of being a singled out superlative
Most Likely to Suceed, Best Athlete,
Best Looking, Most Well-liked,
or the like…

But, we should let High School go—
let it be just as a memory
and leave the mad, silly,
superficial things…
all those adolescent insecurities
peer pressure absurdities
the daily class grind,
plus pointless Scantron tests,
bad fad hairdos and all—
behind

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