Immigrant (riding the bus home)

There I am riding the bus from the centre of Athens

It is a lovely day

Summer was late this year.

I want so much to feel good.

This morning

three in number

stubbed a man over a camera he was carrying to film the birth of his child.

The media vultures splashed it on tv screens all over the country.

They said they were Arabs

They said they were north Africans

Now hooded kids with machetes chase whoever fits the colour

on the streets.

A Bangladeshi kid hiding in a bin was stabbed to death.

Most of the foreigners have no papers and they don’t go to hospital

They sleep on their wounds

in abandoned houses,

on floors crawling with roaches, mice, lice and all kinds of shit.

The locals call for more policing but not against the hoods.

Five blocks north the hooded lifestyle anarchist dwells in micropolitics

They want direct democracy, no governance and less policing.

Three coppers beat seven living shades of someone’s life.

Protesters retaliate breaking shop windows, burning police cars and vandalising banks.

The locals call for more policing against the hoods.

Fuck this, the world’s gone mad.

But some will say this is cliché

Some will say I say this to provoke,

some say that political poems are crap and mean nothing

well fuck that too.

I don’t give a flying monkey’s for what they think.

This is not about me.

I only write what I see trying to get home from the centre

I apologise if I cannot do it differently

Forgive my ineptness

I have no new method to present it.

This is about me.

Being a foreigner you are always a second class citizen.

Being unemployed at home you are a second class citizen

I am damned if I go. Damned if I stay.

Everybody around my age group wants to go.

I am broke,

she is pregnant.

We scrape a living,

she smiles,

she is hopeful.

I am thankful for that.

She asks me to join her on the balcony to watch the kids playing on the streets.

Silly me does not

I argue with someone on the net.

I stopped

I hacked the connection from the flat upstairs and the signal comes on and off.

It’s on.

I argue again about unimportant things

I am affected by that too

I don’t sleep well

One more thing to think about and prevent me from sleeping well

At least this one will go away soon

It is temporal.

Like a brothel, acting the thespians, touring the countryside.

The world calls for beautiful imagery,

disguise the suffering,

with something

like a pretty image in hell

dunno, maybe a girl’s laughter in absolute darkness.

That might do it.

I go back on the bus

Two guys in front of me talk about last century,

Argentina,

They saw the same thing happening before

on some place else,

we are repeating the same shit

all over the place

Such a human trait that is

I fall asleep on the bus guarding my empty wallet.

Then the swallows come

we chase them out

burn their nests

and wear their wings on our heads.