I've wanted to write a book since the day they made me.

I've wanted to scream to the world since the day I was born

     in words and phrases, swathed in black umbrellas and

     the souls of the useless and the beaten

I wrote this poem on my own time

     because nobody taught me how

I wrote this poem with the hearts on my sleeves

     because They didn't tell me to.

We were born with freedom

     but taught with restrictions.

Our betrayal as we exit the shelter of the school system

     and venture into the world of dreams we were promised

     is over ten-fold.

They say people die every second,

     but they never tell of how many people die inside

     every heartbeat

     when they realize that all the information they memorized for that big test

     has already been forgotten

          but that information wouldn't even help them if they had remembered it.

We are taught that William Shakespeare was a beautiful artist

     but not how to tie our shoes in a way that expresses ourselves.

We are taught that the derivative of e to the power of x is e to the power of x

     but not what e to the power of x even is in the first place.

We are taught that saying the pledge of allegiance every morning before class is a good thing

     but not why.

Human beings walk around the world in a blinded haze.

Human beings know everything but they don't know why or how or what it means.

I was told by Them that the number pi is used in certain equations,

     but it took a hero to convince me what pi is:

          Beauty. A Black Umbrella in its truest form.

I was not taught that we can teach beauty.

We can.

We just choose not to.

Sometimes I wonder if They are just like us students.

     I wonder if teachers don't know what it is exactly that they don't know.

When, in the long timeline of history, did we decide to stop teaching relevance?

     When did we decide to teach vague lessons about dates

          when we need lessons about lessons?

I want to propose a plan to Them, to the teachers and the principals and everyone else

     but I was not taught how to plan.

     We wrote goals down on a piece of paper but we were not taught how

          important each goal and dream is.

Worst of all,

We were taught that we don't need to teach ourselves.

     In school, we are taught useless uses.

     When we go home, we practice useless uses.

     We can't sleep because we fret about proving our knowledge of useless uses.

     When we return to school, we regurgitate everything we learned about useless uses

          and leave the mess on the floor for someone else to clean because we don't want it anymore.

We don't have time to teach ourselves when we are so busy knowing nothing.

The best plan I can present to Them,

     to the teachers and the principals and everyone else

Is only that you need to learn how to teach us how to learn.