juvenile delinquent




Life has been unfair to me
This can’t be all I was intended to be
Doesn’t this life hold much more?
Can’t I make it out of this hole?
I am 16 years old

I want new clothes
New shoes
I want a phone!
Why would my parents not provide?

I can find ways to make things work
This nonsense that surrounds me must stop
I am tired of my poverty
I am enraged by my struggles
I shall make it out
By any means

I picked an axe from my neighbor’s farm
I exchanged it for meat and ham
The butcher doesn’t know
Neither does my mum
I need a bigger take
I am 18 years for God’s sake!

I nicked car headlights outside the mosque
Four headlights for thirty smokes
That is a good deal no?
 I am making my name hello!
And twenty years that may not be so bad a show

I have just received a briefcase of gold
From a white man who was shaken and old
I stood straight took instructions and strutted out bold
I am a go-between
From me to the big man across the creek
This is the big break I seek
I am twenty two years
My future doesn’t have to look so bleak

I moved up the ladder
Got a gun and I rule wider
I have my own sixteen, eighteen, twenty and twenty two year olds
But I will not live to tell my tale
For at twenty four
I hear the knocks on my mother’s door
I had come to upcountry to lay low
But someone must have mouthed.
For tomorrow I will be no more

I am a thief.

written with a 16yo thief, I encountered to day, in mind. May this 16 year old make better choices before life chooses the sequence for him.

#100daysofblogging #Day 6

p.s: I lacked an appropriate photo...

2 comments:

  1. Amazing writing! Moving story! May he make better choices and be redeemed! :-)

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Thank You Ndanu, I personally hope the beating somewhat helped.

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