You Need a Miracle to Intervene!

Dedicated to all those who have been wrongfully and unjustly convicted of a crime they did not do.

Wrong place

Wrong time

Wrong crowd

This ghetto rhyme

Dark skin

Racial profiling again

No money for a legal defense

The prosecution plays a pretense

The interrogation is intense

Detectives rotate out and in

He keeps saying, “No!”

And yet they condemn

Weary and deplete

He pleads to doom

Just to use

The restroom

His bladder about to burst

They point, yell and curse

He begs for sleep

The detectives won’t let him speak

His truth

They agitate

They rouse

Accuse him of something he didn’t do

Broken down from the torment

Guilty before proven

Innocent
A life sentence
Or maybe just ten

This fretfulness makes his head spin

Exhausted

He caves in…

Raised by a single parent in the slums

The only prospect is welfare or a gun selling drugs

His neighborhood target by the drug cartel

Politicians,

Hoodlums,

And the military-trained police

This war on drugs is a front to fleece

Voracity

The real enemy

Preying on peoples misery

A confession becomes his only opportunity!!

His mother now

Is his only friend

But even she cannot protect him

She watches as her son drowns in this immoral storm

From an unjust system that is broken and torn

His father he never met

He is either in prison or dead

His life flashes in his head

His stomach full of dread

In the courtroom,

He feels like rubbish on an assembling line

Nobody there to ease his mind

One of the forgotten kids

Left behind

Stamped a felon

He just turned eighteen

These prison bars will screech and scream

He quivers,

“No more dreams!”

Dysfunctional poverty

The scene is demeaned

The crime routine

You have to swim upstream

Since these streets are so damn mean

If you got beef you better have a spleen

No weapon,

You’ll need a time machine

Nothing here is unforeseen

The ghosts walk in between

Trick or seize

Scheme to breathe

Human beings unseen

In the hood

It’s constant Halloween and

You’ll need a miracle to intervene!

Authored by Shellie Blevins