My City

The feeling is great, with the finger around the trigger/

As the chamber empties you really think you’ve grown bigger/

The hapless figure writhes in pain as life from him slithers/

Forever to be missed by loved ones to whom only memories linger/

On you move looking for the next target terrorizing the hood/

When she appears from her late night job and stops at the site of the face in a hood/

Which without a second thought and with total disregard for bad and good/

Proceeds to violently abuse the very institution of motherhood/

Is this what civilization bequeathed to my city/

Cold blooded animals wielding guns and machetes/

Homeless urchins trying to make a buck/

The lost generation who never had the luck/

To know their parents and now abandoned and forgotten/

They have to survive, through means legal and illegal, to free themselves from the net that caught ‘em/

They are not our problem, we think as we pass around the ball/

Of the pitiful blame game and drop it as quickly as we get them like hot coal/

We frown at their lack of education, while it was our collective failure that they didn’t get one/

Others may have got it, but employment was just but a painful distant mirage/

The role models we could look up in the society are as corrupt as they come/

Their fuel guzzlers juxtaposed with the garbage heaps where the homeless set up camp/

They make laws that virtually criminalize every unemployed youth/

Regardless they never set up frameworks to cater for them after school/

The disillusioned plunge head on into crime/

The ill-advised quickest way to make a dime/

Their human feelings neutered as they get mired in grime/

Friends, neighbours, brothers turn into human savages/

And become uninvited shareholders in your hard earned monthly wages/

Then finally the police bullet with them catches up/

Felled with their positive energies completely untapped/

And we now celebrate the definite peaceful nights and sleep/

For the great gangster has been dispatched into eternal sleep/

We forget he was just but a stage in the vicious cycle/

For a more lethal dragon springs up and spreads its tentacles/

And the problem we thought we eliminated never seems to come to an end/

Foe how long are we going to kill our young people/

When we could have molded them when still young and supple/

And cared more about their future and not only when campaigning for political office/

But for posterity and responsibility to suffice/

Is investing in the youth so much to ask/

Is affordable education too difficult a task/

And so is with making employment opportunities not so scarce/

For sure crime doesn’t pay/

But someone has to lead the way/

The proverbial Moses to part the waters of the Red Sea/

And open the eyes of the youth and make then see/

I don’t have the faintest clue as to who that person is/

But a look into your mirror migt shed some light into this/

Ends…