A poem titled "english class" that announces its refusal of a grammar rule is setting up a joke, and the joke is on the speaker as much as on any teacher. Parallel structure is the sort of thing a red pen circles: if you list things, give them the same grammatical shape. The five lines of jayanad's poem declare independence from that rule. Look closely at how they are built, though, and the declaration starts to wobble.
Every line opens with "I" and a present-tense verb. The first three then settle into the same pattern: "speak in parallel structure," "think in chaotic narrative," "write in fragments." Verb, "in," noun phrase, three times over. That is parallelism, the very thing being disowned. The speaker claims to be messy and writes a neat little list. There are a few ways to read this. It may be a wink, proof that the speaker could follow the rule and chooses not to. It may suggest that even a "chaotic narrative" has a pattern if you stand far enough back. Either way, the poem refuses to be as disordered as it says it is, and that gap is where most of its energy comes from.
The pattern snaps at line four. "I love too hard" drops the "in" and the noun phrase altogether. The line lengths show the same collapse. By my count the first two lines run to nine syllables each, then the poem drops to five ("I write in fragments") and four ("I love too hard"). The poem shrinks into fragments just as the third line says it will. Then the opening line returns at full length, like someone recovering their breath.
The vocabulary shifts too. "Parallel structure" and "chaotic narrative" are classroom words, long and Latinate and slightly technical. "I love too hard" is four plain, one-syllable words, and the sentence is about feeling rather than language. Placing it fourth, right after "fragments," suggests the two are connected: the speaker's broken-up way of writing and thinking comes from the same place as their excess of emotion. The word "too" matters here. It is a judgment, and it sounds like a verdict the speaker has heard from someone else and now repeats. The poem never says who said it. Judging by the title, school is one place where the speaker has felt measured against a standard.
On the page, the poem follows the habits it describes. There is no rhyme and no end punctuation, so the lines never quite close. "dont" has lost its apostrophe, and in a poem about grammar it is hard to read that as an accident. It works as a small act of the defiance the lines announce. The title is lowercase, and "I" is the only capital in sight, which leaves the speaker's own identity as the one thing standing upright in the text. The rhythm is flat and spoken, closer to a muttered confession than to song.
The repeated first line is the poem's most interesting move. Read the first time, "I dont speak in parallel structure" is a claim about style. Read again after "I love too hard," it sounds more like a defense or an admission. Now the refusal of tidy sentences looks like a refusal to tidy up feeling, and the grammar rule stands in for a larger demand to be orderly, measured, less. Ending where it began also makes the poem loop rather than progress, the way a thought circles back when it can't be resolved. The word "narrative" adds another wrinkle. A narrative is a story, so the speaker is admitting to having a story, just not one told in a straight line.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it fits into so little space. It never lectures about creativity versus rules. It lets the form contradict the claim and leaves the reader to decide whether the speaker is a rebel, a perfectionist in disguise, or simply someone whose feelings outrun their sentences. For anyone who has had a thought come out wrong in a classroom, and wondered whether the problem was the thought or the sentence, those five short lines say a good deal.