City Kids

They say we don’t know what it’s like to be in the real world To pay bills To struggle in a job To maintain a family They’re right We know much more We know abuse Physical, verbal, emotional abuse We know the sound of endless gunshots at 2:00 in the morning The screams of women getting mugged The pressure of making our parents proud And earning our college education, Not, by paying for it through loans and grants, but through scholarships We know food stamps, WIC, and the dollar menu in McDonald’s We know basketball hoops without nets And parks with only a few patches of grass We know four-hour shifts because the law won’t allow us to work any longer And white policemen standing in the corners of every block Waiting for another innocent male to stop and frisk We know rap and Hip-Hop We know the stench of marijuana- or Mary Jane as we say- In the streets as we walk by We know how crazy the world is How insane we drive one another How unfair life is and how easily it can be taken away And how much we have to fight to keep it going They say we don’t know what it’s like to be in the real world And be on your own But I just can’t seem to understand what we have yet to learn It seems like we’ve been through it all I’m 17 I’ve learned to be scared like a six-year-old Strong like a fighter Quiet like a mute And wise like a sixty-year-old man So tell us Tell the teems of the Bronx And the students with college acceptance letters to BMCC The kids in the King’s Orphanage School at Queens The sons and daughters of mothers who were sixteen and pregnant Tell us What do you know that we don’t? ‘Cause we have woken up every morning to fight in this crazy battle called “life” -Our Real World