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I too, lead America.

I am a humble servant,

a patch within the bricks of a crumbling school

designed to fail its students.

I am not strong enough to fix the brick and mortar, but

I can try to reach the rusting pipes that pour

students into prisons, into

gutters.

Oscar Wilde once said, “we are all in the gutters,

but some of us are looking at the stars.”

My students cannot see the stars—

the smoke from gun barrels blocks their vision.

Tomorrow, I will tell my kiddos that they can be anything,

but the world tells them they cannot.

What do I tell these children,

these children,

these children

turned to grown men by a media so pervasive

they no longer believe that they are beautiful,

innocent,

capable.

My tool box is not bottomless—

the pipes are bursting.

Besides, all of the money, philosophy, pedagogy, good intentions

are not a steel epoxy—

my students are still stopped and frisked on their way to class.

I want to believe that One Day, All Children but

what happens when those children leave the classroom behind?

Their real education is not with me,

not with my colleagues who, like Brutus,

claim to lend them an ear but betray them in two years.

My students learn more from their own world than I,

Shakespeare in hand, can ever dream to teach them.

Surviving is not in the curriculum.

Yet,

I too, teach America.