para la gente de la calle

I took a drag from my cigarette and passed it down the line. The line of drunken vagabonds that are deadly at night. I gave it to the lady that sat on concrete steps pleading for the poison that makes her a warm and friendly sight. They came together and fought poverty when birds took the North flight. When the coldness swept through the streets of Santiago, it was in the papers and the news. And I wondered why they did that, why they even cared, why some people tried to reason, and why some others simply stared. I wondered how they got there, and then I saw the youth. No judgment passed from me, it was just my heartbeat of truth. And if rhythmic sounds could speak, of injustice passed down the line—from drunken father, to hoodlum son, from a pregnant girl to her boyfriend’s drugs—then my heart would beat the world ‘till our ears would simply hear no more. I’d cry the tears that the old men can’t. When you find out you’re nothing better than alugien sin casa, alguien para nada.

So I come back to the place where dreams of greed gratify men in suits. Men in suits that speak of the current spending bills, putting it all on our TV screens as if the big numbers fit there so easily. We’ve been in Iraq for a while now, and both parties don’t see us getting out. We sit in our houses though, we sit in our beds, and we pretend that politics will be over when Bush is dead. But it’s not the man, or the men that are in charge. It isn’t the administration that liberals try to blame so hard. It’s the system in which we live, where individualism is held above the common good. You know Communism is extreme, and socialism simply can’t work. Yet all we require is security, and no one knows that a gun won’t provide this and that the last question of life might be ideology, Hey Mr. President What’s that worth? Because when you think you can fight, and when you think you can run, ladrones from every corner have a blade running up and into your lungs.

But people won’t know this and will never have the interest to learn. They won’t learn the words of another language, they won’t read any other religion, they can’t open the book of statistics and figure out who’s suffering through this war, they won’t run down to South America and feel the stickiness of injustice in the air. So I require one thing of myself, since it’s the only thing I can sometimes choose in this cruel and useless world. When I die I’ll die like the meek, those that will come up one day to take this Earth from the hands of a few fucked corrupt white men.

I’ll be there, right before the true revolution begins. I’ll die a human’s death, one of no heroic deed or glory. And I’ll be there in the streets with my compañeros, alugien sin casa, alugien para nada—someone for what is justified.