His past smells of a ditch
drying up its putrid stink
as stale as the street air.
It belongs to a smoggy neighborhood.
In the memory of tattered rags
flapping like flags on the clothesline.
As if dreams can be scavenged
out of the hilly mounds
of garbage, dumping its gifts
of someone else’s trash turning
into someone else’s fortune.
No one cared about armpits
getting wet and sour for hours,
as long as the bad odors
can promise him little money
to buy fish sauce for rice.
Sniffing heaven on earth-
little angel never complaining
about life, about the linger-
of those occasional whiffs
from the broken sewer.
Nor the rising sting of steam
emanating from his broken skin
pierced by the cruel sun.
Nor inhaling the dry cough of cars
and buses farted poison.
The way he exhaled yesterday
walking on a pavement slow,
feeling the throbbing locomotion
churn on his empty stomach.
A street urchin squeezing the crowd
like a fly hopping on a hope
above the grease and grime
that smeared a childhood.
He won’t cover the past
with today’s perfume
nor sanitize its images
in suds of detergent.
He’s not ashamed
of the scent of his past-
the smell of poverty
that swarmed his innocence
and have walked
the muddy line across
the nook and cranny
of his every bones.
He survived them all.
Specimen
Posted in Books, Current Affairs, Film, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Relationships, Religion, Social Commentary, Society, tagged authority, awaiting, benediction, birthright, blindside, blood, born, borrow, bow, break, call, class, come, competition, crab, crowd, culture, curse, dare, dark, defy, dirty, down, envy, fanaticism, fate, first, fist, force, forward, freedom, gap, give, God, grab, hands, hard, house, humanity, ideals, imitator, labor, land, language, leap, life, lifetime, little, master, measure, millions, minion, misplacement, money, number, oil, One, other, pale, palm, people, poem, poetry, prime, privilege, pull, put, question, raise, religion, reservation, rule, scent, seat, seethe, self-worth, servants, silence, skin, social commentary, soil, sound, space, speak, specimen, stare, statistics, struggle, subservient, supremacy, swollen, syllable, synonym, tall, teaching, tell, time, tongue, tree, want, wide, world, worship, yardstick on March 21, 2012| 2 Comments »
We lived in a world where
statistics is synonymous
with being number one.
Measuring up in a yardstick,
struggling our lifetimes
competing for spaces
reserved for subservient
imitators of culture and class.
Like crabs crowding and grabbing
and pulling each other down
wanting to rule the world. People
above people. Force against force.
For those who dared raising a fist.
For those who questioned authority.
For those who defy their masters
raised from the land they call-
the first world. Their birthright.
Is it about what you’ve been taught?
Is it about how you’ve been raised?
Have I been misplaced by fate?
My skin’s darker, hands dirtied,
swollen by hard labor. A gap
so wide I couldn’t leap forward
a privilege’s bloody to break.
The one with the skin much paler
has the prime seat in the house.
The one whose ideals are taller than the tree
had their palms oiled by the scent of money.
And their minions bow down in worship.
Supremacy over self-worth. Fanaticism
over humanity. Millions, blindsided
servants to little gods awaiting benediction.
I can’t do but keep silent and curse
the soil in which you were born,
giving you a seething stare in envy.
Shall I borrow then, your language
slipped out of your tongue? For I will
put sounds to the syllables of freedom
to speak and tell you, “our time has come”.
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