The kid can’t stop moving, can’t stop opening and closing his laptop, hitting his knee against the desk, and correcting the teacher under his breath, and I can’t concentrate on anything. Try concentrating from inside a tornado! He just spilled some water on my notebook while talking over the teacher with another student who’s completely ignoring him as well. God, get away from me! Why he just can’t sit still and shut up is beyond me. It’s not like it’s hard, at least not for ten seconds. It’s a poetry lesson in class today and he keeps muttering how poets think they are smarter than everybody else, and how secretly stupid they are, and how the things they say don’t matter except to the elites. He hates poets and poetry and he can’t understand a single thing they say, thinks that even when poets talk about poetry in conversation you can’t understand them. The definitions he must learn about poetry are in an alien language. Our sixth grade class has to copy and paste definitions about poetry today, and he can’t even do that, and even the teacher thinks poets are too difficult with their explanations. He asks the teacher what is a definition, says I don’t want to do this. This is what I must put up with. Not that I’d call myself a poet or anything, but I’m interested in learning about this poetry stuff and I think I might be writing some in my diary anyway. I mean everybody is different and likes different things and everything, but to just call a poet kind arrogant and stupid kind of misses the point. And what’s he got against others who know big words anyway! I like big words and thinking about what they mean to me, and I think I might want to to learn from an actual poet! I think that’s important! Maybe he’s just got this one way of reading, if he even knows how to read, and when asked to read anything he doesn’t understand right away he has to admit he doesn’t know everything and that thought hurts his fragile little ego. Poets are smart and important. Isn’t that a good thing? Damn word, he says, and he throws his laptop on the ground. What are you looking at, he says. You keep looking at me and you’ll be next, he says. Why do we have to study this hoity-toity poetry crap anyway, he says. And you know, at least half the class is laughing! I feel bad for the poets. So many people hate them and think their kind should die. I decide I could be a poet and tell him so just to make him shut up, and you know what he says, he says yeah, go die somewhere and write a poem about it.