New Poem & Dedication: Stolen Property

This poem was written partially in response to the arrest (under false charges) for "receiving stolen property" of Elysee Thomas, a good friend and respected poet in NJ. For more information on this, please go to www.slamglobal.com and click on the "Free Elysee Thomas" link. This poem is dedicated to him.

Stolen Property
***
it's 2009, and New Jersey's finest strikes again,
in an empire embattled by evils, but
one wonders why the master perpretrators
aren't being pursued or prosecuted, so
to prove that "THE SYSTEM WORKS,"
they've got to persecute somebody, and
surely society at large
will condone the removal
of a young, black poet . . .
"receiving stolen property," as long as it's
worded properly
will suffice as a charge . . .

but society at large
is guilty
of receiving stolen property . . .
most of this great nation
having sprung from the loins
of illegal immigrants,
geographic dunderheads who
mostly died of syphillis,
never once asking the natives
if they were particularly troubled
by our taking over of their land
writing treaties we planned
to break, and when wholesale slaughter
and firewater
didn't break their will,
smallpox blankets smothered it,
a "kinder, gentler" biowarfare genocide . . .
the very land under our feet
is stolen property
that our great-great-great-ancestors
took unlawful possession of.

we wear clothes and fashions
with fabrics sweatshopped into designs
stolen from street-kid innovators
and set at a price that the laborers
could never afford . . .
and this country would never even exist
if we hadn't stolen living men and women
from their homelands,
tried to beat them into shapes
we could use,
but to admit that much of our nation
was built on the backs of the blacks
would be tantamount to an admission of guilt,
so we cover the track-marks of our greed
with politically correct foundation,
pretending that segregation doesn't still exist
and that racism is a thing of the past; but, like
buried used reactor core rods
our radioactive past can't be ignored.

hip-hop was stolen from the streets
and imprisoned behind the bars of a UPC;
delicacies and recipes from a thousand lands
wind up at celebrity dinners, a thousand a plate,
"for the benefit of the poor;"
every fifth of April, Uncle Sam picks our pockets,
uses the money to by guns, bombs, limos, and blow,
and complains about the "heathen nations"
and their godless ways;
and even God's name is pimped by politicians,
a holy name stolen so it could be
stamped on our money,
and the very dollars in your pocket
could very likely have passed, unknown,
from bloody men who used it to do
things that God would never condone!

and now they've stolen a voice from the streets
just to prove the justice system is still viable,
but whether through oversight or just plain lying
there's a Higher Justice that will hold us accountable . . .
and poets continually provide an uncomfortable reminder
that everything we have is stolen property,
and even the breath we use to speak
is just the stolen breath from somebody else's last gasp . . .
those "things" you clutch will slide out of your grasp,
and stolen voices will be strong enough
to cause your walls to break.