Curriculum

The American High School, Middle School, Elementary School, and Kindergarten curriculum have a standardized topic alongside math and physics: protection against the bullets which throw kids into perverted action. Take out your highlighters, it’s time to review what you need to know in the future.

Week One 

We live in a world of endless lock-down drills and Strawberry Shortcake backpacks with permanent bulletproof linings. 
After an all-time high body count has been reached (it happens almost every four months) 
Tomorrow comes “random” security checks of kids with black eyeliner
The day after tomorrow is when we forget

Week Two

Excuse death as inevitable like scraped knees and throwing up from too much ice cream
Send prayers, write a post on Facebook
Move on with your life

Week Three

Soon the uniform of polo shirt and pleated skirt will be camouflage to blend in with the walls
You will resemble a soldier
Forced to fight the war of weaklings against machine
Then, a science teacher will save the entire citadel
Even though he has turned a classroom into crossfire

Week Four

You hold onto the hope for a gilded future before that future is cut short in twelve seconds
Diaries for seven-year-olds contain one day at a time instead of years

Week Five

You are less important than an industry built on old men encouraging violence
You should want a good guy with a gun
Though you’re helpless either way
The salty tears that drip from your eyes onto the booming microphones are meaningless

Week Six

Take out a piece of paper and tally the number of times you’ve panicked at the bus stop since 5th grade
Count the number of times you’ve huddled under desks, trying not to be seen from hallways
Add them together and realize that you know nothing because you’re a child
“Too young” to not want to die
It’s the end of the week

Week Seven

Raise your hands students, who wants to feel safer by having a gun in the room?
Look around at their outstretched fingers
You are in a room surrounded by peers that say: “I give up on the dreams of pacifism written in our broken-seamed textbooks”
Memorize their relaxed faces, relieved at the idea of finally protection
School should be about creation but destruction is at every turn in the hallway

Week Eight

The battle is over 
We’ve lost since the beginning

Week Nine

The nightmare came true in 2012
And nothing happened
How is destiny going to change? 

Ten...ready or not, here I come.

Congratulations for making it this far. 

I hope you’ve just accepted that the world will never change 

Even when we are dying for the cause