Samba

Requiem of night;

Shadow puppet boys

And harlequin girls

In their half-buttoned nightgowns dance,

Twist and turn for requiem;

Dracula’s orphan children

They suck the life of the ghetto through clenched teeth

That sip from a straw of flawed education and BET.

The daughters wear pigtails of fire and ice

For proper projection of their nature

And Harlem’s sweet nocturne

Is the lullaby of naught for their moonlit slumber

The boys stomp in adamantium boots

And take on lycanthropic forms to howl at the night

Their cries awake the girls from slumber

And together they lament the siblings they’ve lost to the struggle:

The lost boys of a neverland

Of broken bottles and crack pipe dreams,

Broken homes and low self esteem.

Denied a childhood they forever remain immature like children;

Living under the colander sky, upturned they sift into space

Mysterious, they perennially turn to the game as their only saving grace,

Cold and alone they are mired in this world

Which judges based on gender and race

The sweet whisper of a shadow brother and one of the pig-tailed girls is pregnant

A choice of aborted souls or rejected dreams

Their existence is one of living far beyond their means

Listen to the squeals that pierce the silence of nocturne

As they cough up the soot that coats them in-and-out black

They are forced to walk the red hot coals of judgmental culture

Finding themselves preyed upon by vultures of advertising for menthols and malt liquor

It’s not hard to see why these children, born into night, fall into darkness ever

quicker,

When prison cells and pine-cedar walls are the vessels that carry their future

Obfuscating the overture of what would have been their god given nature

In the face of such adversity the medley of boy-girl silhouettes exists fervent and deep

Hidden words shake governmental repose

Under veil of shadow they sleep

Look at the inner city, violent and bright

Listen all-seers to the children of night

Sharing their secrets to the moon, in fight they howl

In unison they hunt

Because alone they fear fighting to escape the pull of the ghetto;

As individuals they cannot sand up to this requiem of life

Stand up my orphans

The moon is full and is more than a broken headlight to illuminate the road ahead

More than the slashed tires of a vehicle the man drained of gas

Going in ever smaller circles

As much as they may gave no future,

These young ones have already had their past stolen from them

There is no light at the end of the tunnel

Because the tunnel ends now and we stand in twilight

From here on out we await the coming of night

Shadow puppet boys

And harlequin girls

Dance to the samba of dejection

© 2008 Eugene Aarons-Cooke