Entitled
Hello trusted, trust-fund baby,
Lucid gentle ears and eyes,
Gentle for too short a time?
Clouded, what you’ll see in me,
twenty-some years past pressing
powder in your sternum—
Will I still smell like home?
Will my poverty reek foreign?
Just know, kid, we’ve set it out for you,
with your taxless struggles taxing
these cracked and flaking fingers—
So don’t say it’s not a real job placing
pre-packaged plastics in your mouth;
I’ll want to look away when you bud
the blossoms of apathy.
And one day you won’t recognize
the difference between
Right and rolling dice,
But trust me, trust-fund brother,
I was promising, too,
until a lot of people like you
aborted my freedom and hope
when you cuffed my rights
in the name of a Pope, sir,
You could have just as easily
been born in a dumpster,
asking, “Why me?” instead of
marking calendars with blood ink
from eighteen karat pens,
So trust me, trust fund deputy,
don’t vote against my safety net,
you’ll get that car you want, I know,
but remember nanny’s cataracts—
They’re the same in all the rest of us
with our underprivileged eyes.
