Okay, so I know that the football lesson and scene where Neil tells the others that he got the part come before this, but for the purposes of the story I have switched this around.

Thank you so much for reviewing. I can't even begin to express how much it means to me :)

Now, as always, anything you recognise has been taken from the movie and was not made up by my brain (as much as I wish it was).

'This way have men come out of brutishness

To spell the letters of the sky and read

A reflex upon earth else meaningless.

With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,

Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged

Shall on through brave wars waged.'

~ A Reading of Earth, Hymn to Colour, XII, George Meredith (1888)

Chapter nine - We all have a poet and a YAWP inside of us

Monday morning arrived much to quickly for the students liking, especially for Mr Keating's class, who sat fidgeting and dreading their own turns, as they watched their fellow students get pushed into the limelight as they shared their innermost feelings with the class.

"Mr Overstreet," called Keating from his perch on the windowsill.

Knox rose from his desk and made his way to the front, unable to meet the eyes of anybody else.

"To Chris," he began, eyes glued to the paper.

"Who's Chris?" Whispered several of his classmates, causing the gang to smirk in amusement

Knox ignored the whispers and began to read,"I see a sweetness in her smile.

Bright light shines from her eyes.

But life is complete; contentment is mine,

just knowing that..."

His words trailed off beneath the murmuring and smothered laughter.

"Just knowing that she's alive," he screwed the poem up with a frown, "sorry, Captain, it's stupid."

He screwed the poem up with a frown. "Sorry, Captain, it's stupid."

"No, no, it's not stupid," the Captain pushed off from the windowsill and paced around the front of the room, "It's a good effort. It touched on one of the major themes, love." He smiled reassuringly at the Overstreet boy. "Love is a major theme not only in poetry, but in life. Mr Hopkins, you were laughing, so you're up next."

Hopkins shrugged as his chair scraped back across the floorboards. He stepped forward, hands shoved casually in his blazer pocket as he said, "the cat sat on the mat."

"Congratulations, Mr Hopkins," Keating ignored the thumbs up Hopkins shared with Fraser. "Yours is the first poem to ever have a negative score on the Pritchard scale." The joke earned a few chuckles from the rest of the class. "We're not laughing at you. We're laughing near you," he grinned. "I don't mind that your poem had a simple theme. Sometimes the most beautiful poetry can be about simple things, like a cat, or a flower or rain. You see poetry can come from anything with the stuff of revelation in it. Just don't let your poems be ordinary. Now, who's next..."

Mr Keating scanned the room, most students avoided his gaze but his eyes landed on the quiet boy at the front, "Mr Anderson, I see you sitting there in agony. Come on, Todd, step up. We'll put you out of your misery."

Todd's head shot up, eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights, "I-I-I didn't do it," he stuttered, "I didn't write the poem."

Kathleen and Neil exchanged a worried look, they both knew for a fact that he had done it.

The Captain merely raised an eyebrow, "Mr Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing. Isn't that right, Todd? Isn't that your worst fear? Well, I think you're wrong. I think that you have something inside of you that is worth a great deal."

He turned to the blackboard and wrote, 'I sound my barbaric YAWP'* in loopy cursive before continuing, "Uncle Walt again. Now, for those of you who don't know. A yawp is a loud cry, or yell. Now Todd, I would like you to give us a demonstration of a barbaric yawp."

Todd only looked at his teacher blankly.

"Come on, you can't yawp sitting down, come on. Let's go," he pulled Todd to the front of the class, where he reluctantly agreed to position himself into a 'yawping stance'.

"A yawp?" Clarified Todd, looking faint.

"No, not just a yawp. A barbaric yawp."

"Yawp," the boy said faintly.

"Come on, louder!"

"Yawp." His volume had barely increased.

"No, that's a mouse. Come on, louder." Keating encouraged

"Yawp," he said, frustrated.

Kathleen bit her lip. Todd's distress was obvious...but maybe...maybe Keating was on to something.

Keating suddenly rushed forwards. "Oh, good God, boy. Yell like a man!"

"YAWP!"

Kat's heart skipped a beat and she stared at her friend who had just rendered the class silent.

"There it is!" Keating flashed Todd a hundred-watt smile, "see, you have a barbarian in you, after all." His smile fell as Todd began to stomp back to his seat. Quickly, Keating nudged him gently back towards his desk, "No, you don't get away that easy."

Todd threw Kat a nervous look before his eyes slid over to Neil, who must have been agitated, judging from the half-smile that he forced onto his lips the moment their eyes met. The eye contact broke only as Todd was turned around by Keating. His blue eyes fixed upon the picture tacked to the wall above the chalk board.

"The picture of Uncle Walt up there, what does he remind you off? Don't think. Answer."

Silence.

Keating's expression remained gentle, but his voice was firm. "Go on."

"A ma-madman," Todd stuttered.

Mr Keating began to circle the boy, tearing his attention away from the thirty sets of eyes which rested upon him. "What kind of madman? Don't think about it. Just answer again."

"A c-crazy madman," he panicked.

"No, you can do better than that. Free up your mind. Use your imagination. Say the first thing that pops into your head, even if it's total gibberish."

"Uh, a sweaty-toothed mad man."

"Good God, boy!" Keating exclaimed, "there's a poet in you after all. There, close your eyes. Close'em. Now describe what you see."

Keating placed his hands over the Anderson boy's eyes and spun him slowly.

"Uh, I-I close my eyes."

"Yes?" Keating prompted.

"and this, this image floats beside me."

"A sweaty-toothed madman?" suggested Keating.

"A sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain."

"Oh, that's excellent," the teacher muttered, "now, give him action. Make him do something."

"H-His hands reach out a choke me," Todd babbled.

"That's it. Wonderful. Wonderful," Keating let go, but Todd kept spinning, his eyes tightly closed.

"And, all the time he's mumbling."

"What's he mumbling?" Keating grinned with pride.

"M-Mumbling, truth. Truth is like...like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold."

His sentence drew a few sniggers and his eyes snapped open, however, Mr Keating covered them before he could get a good look at the class, "forget them, forget them. Stay with the blanket. Tell me about the blanket."

Todd took a deep breath and all of a sudden words spilled out of his mouth. It was as if the dam which had been carefully constructed by all of the careless individuals in his life had broken. His words were flooding out at last. "You touch it, stretch it, it'll never be enough. You kick at it, beat it, it'll never cover any of us. From the moment, we enter crying to the moment we leave dying, it will just cover your face as you scream..."

An unsettling silence hung in the air.

"Don't you forget this," Keating whispered to Todd, pushing the dazed boy back to his seat. "Miss Murray. I believe that you're next."

Kat stood up shakily, eyes alternating between worried glances in Todd's direction, and the old, wooden floor. She kept her eyes on her paper as she read the words that she had written without thinking about the consequences. Anybody who payed enough attention would be able to take a peek into her mind; but there is bravery in vulnerability, she thought to herself, while attempting to stop her cheeks from burning,

"I'm haunted by life.

Memories shroud every inch this family home,

secrets buried deep beneath stone.

Yet I've found friends far from my real home,

inside these walls which make me feel most alone.

Nostalgia haunts the bad, and time taints the good.

It's better than any sin.

Yet time marches on,

reminding me to act on whim.

I'm haunted by life,

By what is.

By what could and has been.

By what is ahead.

By what is within."

Once she had uttered the last words she almost scampered back to her own seat. Whilst she had never enjoyed public speaking, it had never bothered her too much until now. Bearing her soul to the world was certainly not her strong point. She breathed deeply and began to relax as the others took turns revealing their souls.

As expected, the others all had poems which matched their own essences. Neil recited a joyous verse about the beauty of hope and humanity. Cameron's poem was a rigidly structured haiku with the promised theme of love. And Charlie's, while being surprisingly eloquent and gentle, still managed to be evocative and borderline obscene; which was made worse, in her opinion, by the wink he threw at her, causing a flush of embarrassment to rise to her cheeks. It was only when he was at the front that she looked at the drawing of the lesson. Today it was surprisingly tame. He had drawn the woods with towering trees who's uppermost branches caressed the moon. It was only at the end of class when she took a quick second look that she noticed that he had also illustrated small figures climbing upon the stars.

For the first time this year, normal lessons conducted in absolute silence were a relief. No matter how much lighter the class felt after the round of self-expression, nobody was ready to talk about it quite yet. Or possibly ever. Keating was not only aiming for impressive exam results, Kathleen concluded, he was also aiming to teach the value of imagination and individuality to a group of teenagers raised under the weight of expectations and obligation. And it felt like some of them were beginning to understand it.

* 'I sound my barbaric YAWP,' Song of Myself, Verse 52, Walt Whitman (1855)