This website seems to have bit the dust, but here’s the poem:
Poor People
Gathering water from filthy ditches
But we want to sell each other
Forgetting the pain
Being hustlers and pimps
It’s cool
But it wasn’t so cool when
Your ancestors lost each other
Living Jay-Z dreams and Ja- Rule fantasies
Feeding the intricate network of lies
Necessary to complete the project they began
With the building of inner city townships
For the capitalist pigs
Skarfing down the bacon of industrialism
While being fed a steady stream of unrealities
Made true by the glowing idiot box
Which enlightens our spirits to the depths
Of which are yet to be seen
But we believe the executioner’s tale
Of life
A life that he hasn’t lived and we need to believe him
Because he has power
Power we have never imagined
And if we can share that power
Then maybe our growling stomachs
Won’t keep us up at night
Or our children’s cries won’t hurt as deeply
Because the box tells us that there is no more hunger
So we can’t be hungry
We’re just lazy
Because all we did is wash other peoples
houses
drawas
lives
And children
And suckle babies that don’t look like us
And then travel an eternity back to our babies
With their big eyes
Accusing
Their noisy guts
Accusing
Obvious indictments of our laziness
With their dirty cloths and rotting teeth
If I worked harder, then this wouldn’t happen
If my mother and her mother and her mother
Worked harder
My babies would look like the babies I
See in the box
Those babies are fat and laughing
Why don’t my babies laugh
She never thinks
Her baby has never heard her laugh
Her baby doesn’t understand such a concept
She doesn’t understand that glowing box
She just knows that her belly aches constantly
And the one person she loves more than anything
Never kisses her
Hugs her
Touches her
Only sleeps
And leaves
She might not understand the glowing box
But she already knows sadness.
