Fried food on small paper plates
Buttered leftovers
Minimum wages
Stretched thin laying in his seat
Rolling in the mud
Drowning in the debt
Breathing with nostrils of smoke
A smoke break of peace
Little crises adding fuel
Dollar Tree thrills, nipping heels
Driving nowhere far
Stuck to the death loop
Sipping delicious poison
She left the stove on
As a biracial, cis-woman raised in Midwest America by a poor German family that believed the church or the army was the only salvation, I've been trying to encapsulate my corner of the poverty pie to those I call friends today.
First and foremost, f*ck the 1%. It all comes back down to capitalism, baby.
So my battle isn't against, necessarily, the avocado toast eating neighbor or Ferrari revving coworker. It's been written more elegantly, but the disadvantages in life could be explained through a card game. Let's say the simple game of War, where every player is to dealt out the same amount of cards. The immediate problem is there's only 52 cards and the individual decks change base on the count of players. This echoes the limited amount of Earth's resources. How do we deal with that?
History shows us that if we were a person of color, a woman, a nonconformist, (anything outside heterosexual white male Christian normative) we were taken away 'cards ' immediately and/or skipped entirely. Those under the boot of colonizers weren't allowed in the game.
How does it feel to not only be out of the game, but forced to serve those who continue to play it? How does it feel to not only be forced to toil, but be belittled and tormented, ridiculed and disected? Years and years bent over, then molded and beaten into something unrecognizable. When does their test rat say enough? When does their pet rat revolt and they say "it's always been violent!"
My poverty is not mine to blame despite adding more water to the ocean. Yes, I swam to the deep end to see how far I could get. Yes, the water swept into my mouth and these lungs became heavy, but you gotta understand... I've always lived around smoke. It was in the room, in the clothes, in my hair. I carried that smoke like a champion. I was born in that smoke. Her father died from that smoke. I choke, but I survived off that smoke...teasing death with little breath was our bed time story.
So when you offer that dollar or perhaps a thousand, you take a cup out of this ocean. You may even get to see the tops of my lips... But I'm still bobbing, I'm still out there lost in sea drowning.
So f*ck the 1%, because there's always others worse off than me.
Poverty
