This is Day 40 of the Poetry for Peace Challenge 2018-2019. Here is Poem#40. I've learned a lot by doing this but it seems to be getting a little easier. It can be hard when one is tired, not in the mood, short of time or getting up at five in the morning to write a poem but it seems to me that with practice one can turn the creative juices on at will. The only reason we "can't" do it is when we tell ourselves we can't. Try it!
For all forty poems in this series so far, click here
If you want to write a poem (or several) and join me, send them to me and I'll publish them.
If you are an artist or illustrator and so forth and some poem by me or any of my guest poets inspires you, then send your creation to me as well and I will publish that too.
Fun shared is fun multiplied.
The Rap of Liberation - 2nd Movement
by Steve Cook Have you ever noticed
How flung shit never sticks at home?
Some bone of contention
Some reason why we're miserable,
Fearful, unreasonable
Or plagued by something horrible
Is buried in the backyard of
Far and distant people
We often never even met.
Blame sits square on the shoulders
Of neighbors or strangers
As far away as possible
Who are by accusation
And circumstancial evidence
Conveniently culpable,
Ultimately responsible
And intimately liable
For things we find uncomfortable,
Detestable or regrettable.
The problem's always "over there"
With someone else's government,
Economy, choices or environment.
It never sits at home,
Just up the road in Parliament
Whose politicians
Pontificate, prevaricate,
Equivocate and exaggerate
And point accusing fingers
At the Russians, Iranians,
Syrians, Jews or Americans.
They urge us desperately
With slick affability
And bland insincerity,
"Don't look at us, look at them!"
They blamed the Germans
When our own bankers
Shysters and shit-stirrers
Were quietly and covertly
Bankrolling Hitler
And they're doing it again
With some latter day equivalent,
Some cheap politician
Demonising immigrants,
Muslims, foreigners or some other
Convenient scapegoat
Elected to villainy
By an idiot deflecting blame
By peddling unworkable solutions.
The stuffed shirts tell us
They're the experts and we better
Prepare for the worst
'Cos they can predict with confidence
The grim inevitability
That the ailing economy
Is gonna be dreadful
And all of us probably
Will be living in chaos
Penury and poverty,
Out of luck and out of work.
And the world meanwhile
Is going pear-shaped
Tits-up, disorderly or dangerous,
Refuses to behave
With grim intractability
Like something fickle, feral,
Or ominous,
Created by gods
Who are inimical,
Bloody-minded or obstinate.
And we never ask the obvious:
"If you're such an expert,
What are you doing about it
Instead of sitting there in apathy,
You clueless wally?"
But apparently they're helpless,
Impotent and powerless
'Cos some businessman
In Shanghai was late for a meeting,
Or the dice fell badly
In the casino called the Stock Market,
Or Vladimir Putin's running Russia
Instead of Boris Yeltsin,
Or it's all the fault of Europe's
Brain-dead bureaucracy,
Or 'cos people got the hump
Over genocide in Palestine,
Or the fickle ruddy consumer
Lost his enthusiasm for borrowing,
The uncooperative cretin.
The problem is always
Someone else's fault,
The ball's in their court
And we're always the victim,
The effect, never the cause.
And ultimately,
In the final analysis,
When you get right down to it,
The person responsible
Is undoubtedly on the TV,
Never sitting in front of it.
Find more free poetry in the Poetry for Peace series, here
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