Moments
I turn my head
To take a peep
One precious glance
Just one more peek
When I was wee
Could I be three
When we were five
Sat on your knee
My hanging feet
Just out of reach
Before you see
It’s gone too soon
But tiptoes back in times of need
Moments
Sissy in her wedding dress
So sore I just sob
Thirty
So big I could cry
So tall I could weep
No sip of coffee ever long enough
No length of lunch ever lapsed enough
No family meal ever more enough
No embrace ever quite as tight enough
No laugh ever elongated enough
No song ever sung slow enough
No cry ever wept this much
No embodiment of my love ever large enough
You are here
And still
It’s not enough
Preserve my eyes
Just one more time
Just one more peek
Another life
When I was wee
Could I be three
When we were five
Sat on your knee
Let me linger, wait a while
Lie in the hay fields
Beneath the sky
The Lonely Tree
I watch the farm
Where Spring has sprung
Where we grew young
Let me extend
To never end
Let me keep that bit of life
Embalm my child’s eyes
Bind me tight in a spiral of twine
Climb back on the bales of time
Draw it out as picture in preservation
Essential gift to the next generation
I turn my cheek
To take a peek
One precious chance
Just one more peep
When I was three
Could I be wee
When we were five
Just you and me
Just us and we
We’ll always be
Foreverlong
A family
Good Morning
Resources sent at 9
PM
Train delayed
Apathy
Skint, but paid the hefty fine
Sat in the taxi
Up since five
Baptism of fire
I go in blind
Good Morning
Today you will deliver
A PowerPoint
You’ve never seen before
Quiver
To a group of people
You’ve never met before
Children who have seen the worst
Children whose futures
Are driven round in a hearse
People who are treated worse
Than you can ever imagine
Famine
Damaged
Oh - you’ll manage
Good Morning sexual assault
Welcome, look out for knife crime
True or false you can get murdered online
It’s called attempted suicide
Are you awake
Are you aware of climate change
Good
Good Mourning
Your future’s fucked
Trigger warning kids
Your teacher is in mourning
She had to beg
To attend a funeral
She isn’t equipped
She’s set up to fail
Off the rails with lack of detail
From her manager
Undiagnosed
Special Educational Needs
No paperwork? No Proof? No EHCP?
Clearly, no support worker needed
Non medial seizures?
Self harming in class - but no bleeding
Not a cause for concern
I’ll put it down as a TSG
Poor mental health and attempts on life?
Easy
Clearly
No support worker needed
Welcome, Good Morning
Sign in to a calculator
Do you compute?
It takes 30 minutes to load
30 minutes to encode
The education these kids are owed
Each cut you make
Cuts our children
Who try to make it
How will our students thrive and learn
When as staff
We do not earn
Enough to catch the bus
Depleted
No energy to make a fuss
Worn thinner than bone
Live in houses we’ll never own
We are tired
We are penniless and assessed
Signed off work with work related stress
Under staffed
Underpaid
Might as well
Be on minimum wage
Underfunded
Under Tory Government
Our children’s days are numbered
Inflation: match it
Or each year we take a pay cut
No ifs and no buts
We’d take action, except we can’t
You pass bills that do not pay us
Education is the square route of opportunity
Community
Give our starving children unity, and a slice of pi
Why Richi, won’t you spare us a fraction
Your actions speak louder than words
Will your push for mathematics
Help you to quantify how little you pay us
Tory tactics
Pay the rich and cut the asthmatics
Abolish the arts that breath the truth
But your data speaks
And we read it
We liquify your threat with paint
When will our pay equate
To the percentage of our fate
We are owed for data duplicates
Motivate then suffocate
Multiply subtracted time
This is measured and far from fine
Far from equal
Break the calculator
Insurmountable unpaid hours
We cower
Weakened under toppling paperwork towers
Scrape the barrel
Prepare for lessons on the toilet
Don’t forget
To do your planning while you eat
Deliver lessons while you sleep
If the building is burning
Will you carry on learning?
It took you eight months
To teach me protocols for fire safety
Safeguarding training?
It can wait
Safety last
Let’s have a laugh
Look past the glassy manager
Blame the begging lower staff
Good Morning Miss Edwards
Today
You will be taught
How to ignore
Your human instincts
How to show
A child the door
A child
Penniless
No weight to weigh
Starving hungry
What five a day?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
How are they to succeed
With no mouths or money to feed
Forgotten dreams of achieving
Self actualisation
I often fear
I often hear
“I didn’t think I’d live this long”
How wrong
They didn’t draw blood
Send them back to get a thud
No
They’re non medical seizures
Let’s call their bluff
It’s full of fluff
They’re attention seeking
Poor mental health is peeking
I am shrieking
But my precaution meets an eye-roll
Worry
Passed off in dismissal
Acute awareness
An empty chair
Run the stairs
To raise the alarm
They left my classroom to self harm
Broken glass
Right up their arms
A web of blood upon their forearm
Spell it out in flesh and rhyme
We caught them in the nick of time
Before they spread their wings to fly
Off of the multi story car park to die
I take pride
I will not roll a lazy eye
Like you did
This child drew blood
Ill mark it in the system as a concern
The child’s at risk
Of your blinded idle eyes
Vulnerable
Spider addled mind
They convinced her
She was toxic
So she walked the corridors at night
Crying
Holding her mother’s kitchen knife
Someone did this to a child
To a beautiful, funny, creative mind
She could have thrived
If my manager had tried
To catch the person
That turned her blind
That turned her sick
That warped her mind
Level 3 sectioning status
On a permanent hiatus
Welcome, Good Morning
My level 2’s
They start at 9
And finish learning
At half past 5
On a Friday
The graveyard shift
God’s single greatest gift
They call me names like fucking bitch
Fuck off you fucking bitch
I don’t shame them
I don’t blame them
They spit at me with weighted phlegm
And I take it because I see them
I see every single person
I see their terror
I see their joy
I see their rage
An empty page
Beyond their heavy venom
Their oppositional defiance
Is a child
Welcome everyone,
Today you are armed
With a sturdy graphite pencil
Use this stencil
Then screw it up
Cut and paste and re-imagine us
Who can define the word symbol?
It is simple and you are symbolic
Draw out a better future
Listen to your tutor
You are bright
It’s colour theory
Don’t be teary
You are warmer than the truth
Embrace and have a look
Still life
A tint of hope
A shade of fate
No time to waste
You paint it straight
We celebrate
With art
We fight the cuts they make
Hello
Good Morning
Wake up
When will you come to realise
That every lesson shapes a life
It starts with loyal staff
But we’re busy fighting fires
Where is this end?
Where is the truth?
I bid you lord to save youth
I’ve Got Piles
I’ve got piles
Piles of paperwork
Pinched
Targets to type up
When?
What free time?
None of it is mine
Our time’s on the line
On hold
Held at paper-point
I daren’t enjoy a jot
What you’re given
Is what you’ve got
There’s no escaping
It’s just how it is
So here’s more paperwork
Prove to me
Why you deserve a pay-rise
I’ve got piles
Piles of unread emails
On my plate
I feel the weight of the work on my shoulders
Folders buckling with bureaucracy
Census points
Rate the student out of ten
Now double the work
Upload it to another system
Cover your back
Block the cistern
Ofsted operate
Through prosthetic systems
Observing classrooms
A distant loom
I’ve got piles
Piles of data to crunch
Munch on a lunch
Of pot noodle punch
No time to finish it
Not even paid for this
Too busy to break
It’s all take take take take
What’s it like being a teacher?
What is the student experience?
Let me search for it in a file
Microsoft Teams will know the dial
Can you assess it?
Outstanding
Inadequate
How will it fit?
One word that changes lives
One word that ended a life
As teachers
We don’t assess with one word
We use many words
We make the time
So why does Ofsted
Put it bluntly
Ending a life
With one simple
Word
Inadequate
“Ofsted insists that school inspections are important”
Teachers insist that their lives are more important
I’ve got piles
Piles of time
Sacked in the wrong sacks
Far too dangerous to climb
Before I topple
I will reach
I will strike
Strike for my time
To be respected
Pay us respect
Greedy Goose
Greedy guts, gobble goose
No more pasta, no more juice
You greedy geese took all the fruit
A long, wasted commute for poor old Mr Bute
Glutenous geese, you gorge and you feast
“Go grab that meat” gorbed porky Pete
His pipes run thick with gastric grease
No food left to feed to poor old Mrs Reese
You hog and you hoard and you hurl and you heave
You bundle and wheeze with toilet paper knees
Can’t swipe nor wipe with vegan mac n cheese
Poor old Mrs Brown, she’s covered in faeces
Guzzling goose, you gobble and squabble
You grab the last grapefruit and run home to your rabble
The only thing left is a Polish Pot Noodle
Garble and gurgle goes poor old Eric Herble
In shadows they cower, the aisles they scour
Only scattered bread rolls on the long checkout counter
Troll emptied shelves, they left no more flour
These gees leach the gluten at Gertrude’s final hour
Gormandizing geese, you gurgle like beasts
You grunt and you gasp at gorgonzola treats
You’ve stockpiled your pockets and filled up your briefs
No compassion, nor kindness, benevolence deceased
Shop assistant Ernie, turns around and says firmly,
“Serves you right sneaky Shirley, your hoard of bread has gone curly
They raced to the store, they thought they were early
Twas’ a long, wasted journey for Mr and Mrs Fernley
Greedy fat geese, You gulp up your grub
You slurp like a twerp at your gallon of gravy
We begrudge every gargle, every glug that you take
No grapes and no gallantry, only gargling pantries
