This website seems to have bit the dust, but here’s the poem:

Poor People

Living in tin shacks

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.

IKR Author | Charity Thomas