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...

if flowers would pause growth

I think of a flower, 

beautiful, bright and blossomed
and a butterfly flirting around its petals
but I hate that flower
for flowers wilt, wither and die
and butterflies move like radiance never existed
such is life
and moments are our flowers
here today gone tomorrow
and the butterflies move on to the next
and life fades with music and enters another scene
seeds are sown
leaves sprout
and flowers grow
I would love to stop some flowers growth 

long enough that I may revel in their presence.

my voice still speaks clear beyond this steel : listen

I would like to shout out like my friends and say
"I am a victim of circumstances!"
Yet I know I am not
I am a victim instead of my choices
A slave to guilt
A prisoner of fear, anger and shame
I am a convict
A tenant to the state for life.
Each passing day,
A testament to the wasted time
A reminder of the rotting talent
Of authors that write their stories in sand
Everyday a new novel
Of singers and songwriters who compose their songs in the showers belting out the tunes and holding the notes
You can hear the passion as their tracheae vibrate
The teachers teach, patiently
Preachers preach solemnly
I sit at one corner every awake passing hour
Piecing together information
Gathering knowledge for when I leave here
For I will leave
I will be a recipient og president's pardon for I have learnt my mistakes and I have paid my price
But I remain indebted to society
A debt I can't begin tu imagine I will settle in the confines of chains
If you ever listen,
Hear me my son's
Live right and be content with what you toil for with your hands
The blood you shed in your youth,
Stains your palms in old age
Your conversations will always be with the dead
Victims of your insatiable greed
Take it upon you,
To amend your lives before I return
I hear what you do in the neighborhood,  I am not impressed
I never taught you better then but I am teaching you better now
Heed my advice
Sow it in the sun, harvest it in the rain
Enjoy the fruits of your labor under a shade
I will return, and when I do
If you would not have listened to my plea
Or learned from my mistakes
I will make you wish you were held behind this iron bars.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.9