Fourteen year old Raquel
I.
Fourteen year old Raquel walked into class
With a calloused cough and a violent rasp
That fought the air like a lacerated
Lung she said she got from smoking too much.
With silver eyes like mirrors reflecting
Overcast skies and black hair that climbs down
Her weathered face in waves to break her thin
Shoulders like the quaking earth, she expressed
Nonchalance when she spoke of the smell of
Battery gases as her call to meth
Temptation, tearing synapses in her
Brain, dulling the emotion of human,
Holding drugs in lips, Smoke pouring from her
Ears like steam engines grinning without joy,
Missing mother’s mass, embracing children
And father’s features figuring sex and
killing innocence in incestuous
Misuse, amazing graces like screaming
Skyscrapers falling down her angry cheeks,
Lacking life, bleak of boys, watching girls
Who play daunting games of jump rope, spelling
Experience of thunder in reverent
Rooms where teachers pay for chaos, red like
Oceans of virginal violence, speaking
Silence held horrible inside substance
Abuse and a high school woman’s silver
Eyes.
II.
God’s vague vision never included
Pictures of youth in forgetful classrooms
Where blanket testing replaces lessons
Investing in students minds, rejecting
Censored lines from Walt Whitman, ignoring
Eliot’s apathetic wasted lands;
Esperanza’s bleak house on Mango Street
Stands in despair above every kid’s view.
Multiculturalism and Social
Justice are absent here, like they were new
Oppressions while ignorance becomes chains;
James Baldwin is just a footnote removed
From our textbooks written in Texas,
ACLU has no more relevance
When SATs measure intelligence.
Still, we stare aghast when minorities
Appear on TV screens as men of crime
And our streets fill like a damming river
With this generation’s youth who find
Little more than transients in boxcars
Heading down long roads with nowhere to go,
Injecting dreams of drooling drugs, fasting
By force for some intangible god they
Used to call economy, professing
Anarchy and Autonomy amidst
Pictures in high windows of religious
Lobotomy. God cannot help for his
Blinded eyes no longer see what
Humanity has made of humanity.
III.
McCarthy is dead but his ideas
Live on through the Patriot Act; we still
Forget about the Palmer Raids, the fact
That Sadam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds
Which helped to fuel bin Laden’s fury
Was afforded U.S. sponsorship,
And the history of American
Eugenics that spawned Hitler’s genocide;
These United States will remain just as
Responsible for each of those sad deaths;
Education is intertwined in this
Like a pedophile moving in kids;
We are taught in a system built to fail
Breeding blank joy like smiles on TV screens;
The youth create the future and the old
Have seen to it that the future is run
By their white sons who think in tradition;
If we want change, begin breeding dissent
And, unlike Occupy, don’t let it die
Like free speech in the face of Sedition.
Brian Sheffield is a young student and poet living in Pacific Grove, CA. Born originally in Los Angeles, he spent much of his childhood in motion from one city to another and finally settled down, temporarily, to go to school at California State University, Monterey Bay. His ultimate plan is to continue on his writing while furthering his education and, eventually, becoming a full-time teacher.
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