National Poetry Month - Week Two

This week we are sharing some more poems with you from Claire about her experiences this year:

“Window Panes”

From my kitchen table

I find myself not too yards from my stoop

Junkies getting high

Turnin tricks

I’m just watchin

Who’s trickin now?

We should have the IRS on our tail

For how much buying and selling

Happens on Huntington.

Don’t pay no taxes

But taxed spirits listless in the sun and cold

Waiting for their luck to change

Always waiting

The beuatufly mercy of each other

Trivialized through my eyes… and two inches of glass

“Subtraction”

Christmas Abundance-

Jesus was born in a manger

It was humble

A stable

3 strangers

Visit him

Gifts for a king-

So what does that teach us

Boys and Girls hands reach up

As if spitting back verses,

Biblical

Theatrical it’s all a performance

This act of “it doesn’t matter”

How much money

Or stuff

Or …

The savior was poor

It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor…

Unless your poor…Then it matters a whole fucking lot.

For kids who have been taught that the only math they need to know

Is the distance and difference between...

For students whose lives, whose innocent, immigrant lives,

Are peppered with the irony of 160 gifts donated by Fraternal Order of Police’s

-Border Control

Certainly what we are doing

- keep your minds in prison

Fear to unlock the potential

Lest teachers regret the color of our privilege

That says “We’re all the same”

We tell ourselves that lie so we can hear

Sound bites of lives infiltrated by Brian Williams

Rolling Stones,

And still be able to sleep at night

With the fright that “it’s not my back yard”
It’s drugs, and gangs and bad “luck”

Black luck

Not my fucking luck

“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor”

Jesus was poor…

…and he died for it.