The Hood RatI’m sure you know I love you.
You’re everything I need.
You fit the bill of all my desires,
a perfect match for all my dreams.
You’re everything I’ve always craved,
that luscious vision from across the tracks,
that delicate flower, just beyond my grasp, and here you are at last.
*
But what you ask is foreign to me.
You need something I'm not.
Even if I tweaked my nature a little bit,
you’ll give everything you’ve got.
*
But that "tweak" you need is who I am.
It's my essence, can't you see?
You would abolish the hood rat from my nature,
the very thing that makes me, me.
*
While my hood rat may seem trite to you,
a hood rat’s what you see.
So forget about what the other’s say -
here’s what it means to me:
*
I’ve been brutally dragged through the pits of Hell,
yet, managed to survive,
well educated and fully functional,
when I came out the other side.
*
I scrounged the lessons taught at Harvard,
because knowledge, I found, was free.
But Harvard can't teach the lessons I've learn -
that knowledge is unique to me.
*
While they've heard the sounds of a mournful Trane,
and Miles moaning in the night,
not against the backdrop of hunger and pain,
or injustice, hatred, and blight.
*
Yet, these are the things you want me to purge,
to spurn the life I’ve led.
Well, I’m sorry sweet thing, as much as I love you,
it’s the hood rat that provides my edge.
*
Eric L. Wattree
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
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