Everything That's Wrong - POEM

They’ll kill you for an entry-level cell phone,

They’ll maim you if you’re carrying nothing,

It isn’t even about food, nor money

It’s not even about social standing, status

They get some kind of kick,

Some kind of thrill out of it,

High on the crimes themselves.

A cemetery gets robbed,

Fuck me!  Who does that?

A construction site, robbed

Of its tools, what the fuck?

The cops blame everything

On drugs and trafficking.

They would arrest a man

For selling drugs

To keep his family’s

Heads above the bullshit

They devote their time

To giving out tickets

Performing raids

Waiting for tips

From neurotic neighbours

Who smell the faint

Or sometimes distinct

Smell of Mary Jane

They call up the men,

The men in blue,

And they show up

And arrest a mellow man

Getting stoned in his house

They drive around at night,

They wait around bars,

In the parking,

And nab you when you start your engine,

“You’ve had too much,”

And they put you away for the night

For having a good time

But people are starving,

There’s a drought

There’s a president

Stealing money from us

There’s a crime syndicate

Telling him what to do

And indirectly

Telling us what to do

But the men in blue,

They’re worried about the small fries

The small things,

The practically irrelevant things,

And we are prisoners already

Waiting for a change

In the status quo

The regime itself is pointless

Founded upon negative intentions

Based upon a history

That should never have occurred

You’d  think that we’d have moved on by now,

Twenty years after the fact

Twenty years after we were condemned

By numerous other countries

Our media still paints

A picture of racial segregation

Giving others the impression

That we’re still the same cunts

That we were

Over twenty years ago

We had that much time

To correct the problems

Of the former regime

And some of it wasn’t all that bad

And we’ve done more damage

Let beautiful suburbs

Victorian architecture

Fall to shit

Bums, breaking windows

Of buildings left long standing

To shit inside four walls

Desecrating history

All over again

And history is like anything

It has good parts

And some bad parts

And like true human beings

We focus on the bad

We are mindless savages

Ignorant fools

In one of the most beautiful countries

On God’s green Earth

And we need to take our fingers

Out of our arses

And fucking look at it

And just register

What the fuck has gone on,

What the fuck has gone

Fantastically wrong

We can learn some things

From the rest of the world

We can learn some things

From our own sordid, bloodied history

We know exactly how

To fix things

We know exactly

What not to do

But do we really want to

God...only knows

But I beg and plead

That He can make some time

And give us a helping hand

Because we’re too busy

Finger in the anus

The other hand pointed

At everything else

that’s wrong

in this country

© Dean R Boic 2016 (image courtesy of www.nairaland.com)