Dying To Live

He pushes the needle in,
In his many punctured skin;
He disregards the pain
When he finds a purple vein
For the agony is the ecstasy,
That place is his sort of sanity.

She stands beneath the street light
Half-dressed in silver moonlight
Flaunting her youthful flesh
A man she soon will enmesh
In the snare of unbridled lust,
Both lives will thus end in dust.

He knows not where his next meal
Will come from, perhaps he will steal
A loaf to ease the gnawing pain,
Or grovel in yellow sand and spilt grain;
Either way, ‘tis an undignified choice
When no one listens to the poor boy’s voice.

She weeps pools of bitter tears
As the horror of his death nears;
He’s the only son that she’s got
But, disease shows no mercy, not a jot
As a hot sun beats relentlessly down
On all souls in this poor African town.

Such is the vast contrast between
Those Africans we see on the T.V. screen
And those of the affluent West
Who live lives with no letup, no rest:
Drug addicts dying, yet, intending to “live”;
Prostitutes, their bodies for money they give.

That boy that scratches for some food
Lives a life so very, very crude;
He wants to live, yet, will surely die
As rulers prefer to turn a blind eye.
On mines and bombs their money is spent
On genocide they seem hell-bent.

That wife who will soon lose her son
Would rather see doctors, not soldier and gun;
Her son could then have been vaccinated,
In a surgery she would have patiently waited,
But, not so, priorities are all wrong
So, to the grave he will go with a song.

How we long for much better times
When children will sing much nicer rhymes;
“Ring-a-ring-a-rosies” no longer to be heard
Just cheerful sounds like from a bluebird
And food for thought, and stomachs too,
Times when men live in peace and joys accrue.