Shouts! Poem by Peter Heron

Shouts,
I resent being a policeman,
Linger through the whitewashed corridors,
I am here to teach,
Mixing with the taste of chalk,
Not hold the children down,
Compounding the barely veiled classroom tensions,
"Sit down, shut up! " are not words which easily spring to my lips, Thirty corks bob in water,
Yet to survive I must become someone else,
I struggle to hold them down,
Someone new,
But one by one they slip through my fingers,
And when that happens,
I lose control,
What will that someone want to do?