"Drugs," A Poetry Post

There are drugs to help weight loss,

drugs to grow breasts,

drugs to put more hair

on a man’s chest.

Drugs that over time bring us

skin tone perfection;

drugs that create for some

4-hour erections.

Drugs that make our

quick kids slow; and,

drugs that make our

high boys low; and

Oh! The places that

we can go because

drugs hold us steady when our

wits say no.

You would think that

such a world would

use it’s talents to

save young girls from

leukemia.

But, oh!

That can’t be so when

there’s a market for

“Whoops, I think I

might be pregnant”

coitophilia.

Drugs for feeling good all over;

drugs for helping us forget;

drugs to keep ourselves in check but

not to cure grandma’s cancer.

Drugs to clear our fingernails;

drugs to clear our old age spots;

drugs to let us eat more dairy but

nothing for Ebola.

Drugs to help us sleep at night;

drugs to keep our babies quiet;

drugs to bulk up our scrawny muscles but

nothing for sickle cell.

Drugs to help us fall in love;

drugs to get us off our drugs;

drugs to control our mensies but

God; oh God; nothing for

AIDS-infected infants or

the prematurely demented or

autistic ten year olds or

Parkinson’s.

You must admit we put our trust

into the hands of scientists that

abandoned us.

Instead of making for us

what we needed,

they’ve arrived at the war for life

and outright conceded.

To you in your lab coats working late

to make all of our sex lives great,

I say you are smarter and

you probably work harder than

me.

"Who are you," you are asking yourselves.

"Being so illiterate,

how can you judge?

You don't understand at all!"

But when I think of your chance to make

all that’s ill mended;

and all that you’ve done besides

address disease and end it;

and all the people who’ve died without

hope to be well,

I can’t help but understand

the greatness of your fall.

-T. D. James-Moss

"Commodities," A Poetry Post

Everything from the ground can be sold.

Green beans and cacao leaves,

pecans from the pecan trees,

coffee, cane, corn and peas,

and rice

Sweet potatoes, peppers and thyme,

melons, pears and summer wine,

pineapples and muscodines

and cinnamon

Most on which we like to feed,

most for which our bodies bleed,

brown and yellow skins splayed open,

lain in fields to dry out white

Diamonds, oil, raw crude dollars,

like the whole grains, fruits and collards,

harvested by a struggling man and

handed over to psychopaths’ hands

Out of foods and jewels to hobby,

some madmen reach out for bodies,

sweet young Asians, Africans, Indians,

kids running down to corner stores

After consuming all the greens and

selling off all the flashy things the

evil cannot restrain themselves they

just keep reaching out for more

Not satisfied with a life of greed but

wanting to achieve immortality a

man will go to black markets with the

mind to buy a poor man’s liver

Not realizing in his haste that

a black market organ is a

spiritual rape,

the bold, black buyer

jumps in that life boat

forgetting that Satan is a

renegade giver

Everything from the ground can be sold.

Seems like there should be a rule that

peoples can’t be bartered off like

jewelry, soft drinks, clothes and food.

Sure,

there’s some law in some great book

written to decry its legality,

but in practice and talks where the

wicked men walk,

a man and his woman,

his first born and his children,

his mother and father are

commodities.

T. D. James-Moss