Sometimes I write songs. I’ve been an avid writer for about twelve years and I feel the most powerful jeremiad I’ve bourne to lyrics is a song called “Trapped Behind the 8-Ball”. This song, the Joseph of all my lyrical creations, isn’t about me, material possessions or my girlfriend breaking up with me because she’s a parasitic abomination who prefers the company of women. This piece draws attention to the one thing I feel most passionate about.
When I close my eyes I see their faces,
That’s why most nights, the only light in my room
Is the glisten bathing the face of my iris.
I battle sleep for if I feed this growing indolence,
The innocence of their visages could implicitly,
Yet persistently visit me

Global poverty is a social epidemic. Spreading at exponential rates, it’s comparable to the Angel of Death’s fatal fondling in the bloodless homes of doomed Egyptian families. Over 75% of the world population lives in indigence and generation after generation in countries perpetually smitten by deprivation are growing not only in size but in squalidity as well.
Third-world countries in Africa, South America, and Asia continue to produce incalculable numbers of offspring despite their bereft condition. These children of impoverishment inherit the same world my brother and I do. Yet their world is one of hunger, fatigue and insufficiency, sacrifices we have never had to endure in such degrees.
Kissing the lids of my dreams,
Dressing my dormancy with visions of infant corpses’
Insatiable screams.
Virgin teeth grinding for something to satisfy
Understandibly coveteous abdomens,
Adamantly spurning abandonment
By the planet and its inhabitants
Who shut their eyes so the bad things will go away
Resuming their idle existences

In the Summer of 2008, I found myself actively seeking employment after a skirmish I took part in with a Transfer Manager from Rockwall, who felt everyone entering the inner-city Gamestop in which we worked was a potential theif, that resulted in my eventual and reluctant resignation. As I filled out an online application to the local Walgreens (I didn’t get the job), I overheard a disturbing narrative on Free Speech TV, a donation-based station offered by my friendly satellite cable provider.
Idolizing the mistress of liberty,
Killing the paradigm of salvation
By denying the more deserving the maxim of a nation
Under God, iPods and Walmart,
If one family’s starving then we all are
At least that’s how it should be,
But me and my agents of leavening don’t think in terms of what could be
We’re shooting sheriffs until our voices are heard

The speaker, a british woman with a terribly nasal voice, spoke of the Dalits of India. This is “politically correct” term for what the world once knew as the Untouchables. I had a certain familiarity with this ethnic group having done, more or less, thorough research on India’s caste system, eventually leading to an essay on how Hinduism perpetuates racism for the school newspaper, The Tribune, (it was denied). I pivoted my torso from the computer screen towards the television only to be assaulted by the most horrifyng image my seventeen-year old eyes had ever bore witness to.
An emaciated elderly man of Dalit designation sat, ironically enough, indian-style, with a child, almost just as malnourished, in his lap. The man, with eyes that glistened under the light of our irascible star, scooped, with bent hands, the sand beneath him and fed it to the infant. Tears assaulted my eyes as this took place yet, I couldn’t turn away. This image was Sodom and Gomorrah sinking into the depths of the Adversary’s jurisdiction and, although employment may’ve been, to most, a more imminent issue than a four-year old documentary, I voluntarily shifted into a sickened, six-foot three salted effigy witnessing what I felt was the lowest of human degredations.
Like the snarl of a stomach
Filled with excremental water
And parasites in babies in parts of the planet we deem third world
As if their world is not ours,
When they look into the sky at night
We see the same stars, more or less
For nights I cried, unable to wrap my mind around the fact that people on the planet Earth don’t have food to eat. I mean, in first or second grade, I ate dirt just for kicks. But there are people on this planet, the same planet where on the north corner of John West and Buckner in Dallas, Texas stands a Sonic Drive-Thru, a Burger King and a Jack in the Box, three fast food establishments, there are people without food. Food. I haven’t stopped crying. I haven’t stopped eating fast food, either, but nonetheless, my tears mean more to me than a 99-cent Whopper with cheese.
Excluding the effects of industrialization
Making the privilaged blind to the constellations.
And more aware of Paris Hilton, reality TV and McDonalds
While kids are wearing less than Victoria’s secret models
There are people and organizations who have devoted their entire lives to the benefit of the impoverished people of the world.
And then there’s me, a skinny kid from the South with a shamelessly large vernacular, hoping to grow up and become a talk show host among the ranks of Carson, Leno and Letterman, a writer in the literary pantheon beside Salinger, Hawthorne and Burgess, a filmmaker comparable to George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino and a songwriter drawing inspiration from Marley, Hendrix and Lennon, dreaming of applying to Ivy League schools with close to no chance of ever being accepted, who sees a hour and a half documentary and suddenly hopes to change the world.
What can I do for them? I can write. I can write until my fingers are but bleeding stumps of bone and sinew, poking unfalteringly at the submerged letters of a Gateway keyboard. This won’t put a 100% all-beef falme-broiled patty into the deprived mouths of the world’s most deserving and least availed inhabitants, but it sure beats spending a Sunday afternoon applying to Walgreens, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll spark some initiative in the minds of those unfortunately subjected to reading this.
In parts of Africa and Asia,
War-torn Europe and Middle East
Where the crumbs we throw away become feasts.
And if your feet ain’t blistered
Then you’re probably a foreignor,
More concerned with awaking with a hangover
Than dying in your sleep.