Ghost Rats
“I am exact and merciless, but I love you — there is no escape for you.”
Walt Whitman, from the poem, “To One Shortly to Die.”
With bubble gum hair
we sit alone in huddled silence
on the cold concrete steps
outside the closed gates
of your pristine and freshly polished
town halls
Twitching and itching
Some in need of a fix
Perhaps hoping secretly inside
someone might notice us noticing
your lizard blank eyes
barely blinking
as you posture and grunt
waving yellow cards in the air
like flattened bananas
unfit for chimps in a zoo.
And given all the hoopla
the press and reports
about drugs on the streets
and property damage and abuse
given our age
and the prospects given
self-worth often mirrors
the society lived in
so we have to accept
as we spray paint the walls
before returning to class rooms
leaking with apathy
you lie when you say
you care really
I mean really care
what happens to your youth.
Partition, extradition,
blame all you want and rant
condemn new buildings yet to be built
but the facts are clear
what you choose to ignore
Is left alone with a career
washing dishes or cutting the lawns
of your tax free castles
No more cash for our schools
you bemoan and wail
the rising price of ice cream and yoga mats
has taken its toll on our health!
And if you think we don’t notice
alas I say a time will come
When you are too old to vote
or sail in your shiny beamer yachts
and we wont be there for you
for we will have all long gone
Like ghost rats on a sinking ship
Or more likely sleeping and weeping
wrecked in a morgue
someplace else much like this.
