School Rooms

I had risen to the place between dreams.

Down cramped corridors
My feet dragging on the stairs.
I stooped low under ceilings,
And felt distance compress.

And the walls my fingers touched
Were the walls of a school I left fifty years ago.

A prisoner in its dreary rooms, confined by gymnasiums,
Too big for cubicles where my bare feet went
Slipping in the showers on chlorine-scented tiles.

The restless night brings me here,
To classrooms where I know nothing,
Except that I have already failed
The obligatory examinations.

Doorways leave me in empty rooms;
Desks in rows, cheap wood and metal desks;
Etched upon them, the cupidity of youth, its arrows,
Scratched initials, the boredom of idle hands.

On a plywood chair, knees up to my neck.
I sit cramped beneath the cold steel frame,
My legs rub raw against the rough wood;
My trousers are short; I have never grown up.

Brow-beaten by long-forgotten rules,
All the conventions of success and failure:
Grades and pass-marks, like taped lines
On gym-hall floors, set the boundaries
For games I cannot play,
Games I do not understand.

I stumble alone through hardly-hallowed halls
Sometimes fully dressed, sometimes in my underwear,
Often naked. I stumble through endless corridors
Past anonymous faces, struck dumb by doubt,
Trapped by memory; so much left still to do.

Morning assembly fills the roof with solemn mumbles
Or laughs out loud.

I cover my ears with both my hands
And still behind the murmured words
The guffaws rise and fall.

I see a thousand pointed faces demanding penance.

© BH, 2017

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It has taken me decades to escape the school dream. Never a nightmare, it was often a dream of disquiet with homework left undone and where now I faced the consequences. They persisted long into adulthood. I dreamt I was attending classes, assemblies, or pacing corridors nagged by worry over things that no longer mattered.

And now, so long after, I realised it's nearly half a century gone. Formative years? Best days? In part. And yet, so indelible. An education.

I had to write down some interpretation of it. For those who dream the same.