Saving the Children

When you pass down the streets in Chicago, Cleveland, and Atlantic City, you see it in their eyes.

They’re not yet sixteen, acting eighteen,

Driving their moms up a wall when they don’t come home for supper.

They don’t stop for anything, dying to get high.

The heroin in their shot-up, falling-in veins

Makes them scaly like reptiles, drilled with holes they wish to fill,

But they’ll never get that first delicious, irresistible high back.

They thrust into their body a concoction of medicines aged men would take.

They’ll always be in pain, cause pain, live alongside pain because of a drug that rules their body,

And it calls to them.

It calls to them to kill and rob for the money.

It calls to them like the siren waiting in the water for the sailors above.

Chicago would be better

Cleveland would be better

Atlantic City would be better if only they had their children back.

We need to make them know that there’s something better,

That they shouldn’t stab poison needles into the crooks of their arms.

We should stop and help the struggles of our children

Because they’re as important as any adult

If not even more precious.