Poem About Poverty

A world of peeling paint and mildew,

Where things stop working like clapped out minds.

Looking across desolate concrete,

I wonder why hope is so hard to find,

I wonder where dreams go,

When the dreamer gives up and looks the other way

And graffittis anger on a wall

While little children play.

Striking at a broken down goal -

A crazy parody of this life.

Our ill-fitting shoes on the ripped-up felt,

Cut aspiration back down with a knife.

Bottles smashed on stairwells

And worse - self imposed curfews by night,

Nobodies just trying to be someone,

No one turned on the light.

Ambition like a rusty bike,

The pedals seized; tyres coroded.

The wrong clothes; the coins for hot water.

Just like a gun, emotion is loaded

Then contained and held in -

Though it only fizzles away; a silent bomb

Set to burst when the suffocating mould

Reminds us where we're from.

Kick at my heels; life moves nowhere.

Sighs; fraught words; kids crammed in one room,

Squashed, like canned beans - can't focus on school.

Don't want to grow up, not anytime soon.

Can't see the horizon,

Just a world of budget food and endless TV

Nothing else to do. Nothing to be.

Do you wish you were me?