There will be no justice for poor Eric Garner
Choked by The Law, murdered by The Force
In no time, his memory will fade, and his passing
Only another footnote to a life worth little
In the larger nefarious scheme of things.
There will be no justice for ‘Big Mike’ Brown
In this place it is a crime to steal smokes – yes
It is a crime to walk the middle of the road – yes
It is a crime to engage the Voice of Order – yes
Take a bullet in the gut and beat it –
Don’t turn around, don’t ask questions.
Mothers, raise them right; teach them to run when they see the cops
Son, don’t bother lifting your arms in submission – Just run!
Like a bereaved mother’s tears – Run!
There will be no justice for the 298
Roasted in a fireball and strewn upon an Ukrainian stranger’s field
Blame that country, blame Russia, blame the West
Blame the killers purportedly fighting for freedom
Or heap it all on Putin, Superman of Moscow,
Obama’s alleged groin boil, irritant beyond compare.
There will be no justice for the Children of Gaza
Endless instability and fear – it will never be over you know
You sow the seeds of hate and anger, and someday
A decade later? It explodes in your face, and the cycle repeats
Blame the nationalists of Israel, or the unquenchable fervor of Hamas,
Blame it on Ramadan, on Islam, on The Pope,
Those who go to church on Sunday and those who go on Saturday,
Or those Koranic schools, the Rabbis and the Mullahs
And their Graduates who speak for God
In tortuous treatises, soporific songs, and holy violence
Blame it on the forces that manufactured a home
For Europe’s despised and victimized,
A people decimated by a pogrom so extreme
They earn the eternal right to visit tragedy upon others?
Blame it on parched holy books, and the convoluted history
Of this laughable holy ground polluted by the blood of innocent children
These holy books – all sides have them,
The ones etched on stones in deserts, on scrolls in caves,
Found by Wandering Shepherds, kept by the Guardians of Ancient Secrets.
Lost in translation is the essence of love, the sanctity of life
Blame that on missing verses – those lost to time, and those lost to grazing sheep
Blame it on a world gone crazy, on the imminent Apocalypse,
Or on old man Nostradamus for his silly predictions
We know better now – we have science, zero-tolerance for superstition,
We have Tablets (not the ones you swallow), GPS and the Wonders of Dubai
We are advanced you know –
We, who kill, maim and destroy with drones and bombs, chemicals and rockets
With machetes and knifes and poison
“We who kill with words” – ode to our friends in the Media
Who aid and abet with daily lies and distraction.
There will be no justice for the ones written out of the News
The young and the weak, the voiceless and the vulnerable
Who disappeared in the bogus Arab spring,
None for the impressionable and the strong
Who gave their lives for an ideal hastily thought out
And those who had only a moment to choose life or death
Blame it all on Jesus, on Muhammad or those who fight in their names.
Should Heaven indeed come, they will ground you for defamation,
For taking their words out of context and living large on their copyright.
There will be no justice for Moammar G.
Faux emperor caught like a rat in a sewer,
No rest for those who acted NATO’s script
And surely, no closure for the kin of those he supposedly killed
Poor Libya – resurrective demise, bloody rebirth
There will be no justice, no matter how many poems we write
How many doctrines you expound on
In your defeated, corrupted ivory towers.
Intelligence is in flight, and emotional debauchery, your god, decrees:
Dumb them down; begin with you!
There will be no justice, not in this life or the next
For the original dwellers of the lands of the North
Massacred by the Spanish
Forcefully tamed by hymn-singing fortune seekers
The stars and the scums of the British Isles,
The French and the Dutch, and their agents of various extractions
These conquerors, yet to quit their quibbling over land, sea and air –
European Union or not, their storms are always brewing.
Those were strange times – you savages, tending your land,
Fighting your skirmishes and paying Nature her due
You welcome the strangers with a curious love;
They hug you with toxic blankets
And then with guns and a dose of civilizing religion
Kill them off!
Grab the land!
Give thanks! (Do it every year with turkey-meat)
It’s all in the family now and you people of the past
Will come out to dance in your feathers and wail your ageless song
Whenever commanded – by force, money or political expediency
You shall live separate but not apart, in your circumscribed communities
And your stories of failure shall only confirm what is already known –
These people are not smart enough to manage their own affairs
But the venoms of the years trickle down
The survivors find comfort in drink and drugs
The young, filled with anger and frustration, seek an outlet
In poetry, metal-music, violent demos
Deep inside reigns a sense of confusion, displacement
And injustice, that time cannot erase
The children of the other – the victors, usurpers and newcomers ask,
But why can you not move on?
The children of the vanquished reply,
Because we no longer have the language for legs
And the shackles of unresolved history lay around our ankles.
This apology – from Australia, Canada – comes too late
It rings hollow – will not restore the lives and the way of life
Smashed, stamped out, obliterated, beaten out
This limp gesture, on paper, and financial compensation,
May seem proper, but no amount can restore
A people’s broken pride and thrashed sense of being
Alas, what is destroyed is dust, and the future cannot be built on regret
Gallant Tecumseh gets a few memorial statues,
Residential school survivors get their ‘sorry’ and conscience money
And the rest dissolves into a muddled trance-dance.
Justice it is not, but still, “sorry” is not such a bad thing –
Rapacious Rhodes never gave one to the ones he called
The most despicable specimens of human beings
Duvalier never offered one to those he bestialized
Neither did Mobutu nor the bellicose, plundering King Leopold II.
The African slave, torn from his roots and sold like cattle,
Hasn’t got one yet, and any talk of restitution
For the more than 10 million souls lost in that age of dehumanization,
Meets a brick-wall of excuses and hand-wringing counter-theories
Reparations, who really wants that?
So they pay you some billions…(party time!)
You will fight over it and further tear yourselves to pieces.
No justice there either.
There will be no justice for Lumumba, killed by the Belgians,
The Americans, the British, the French, the people of the Congo,
And his own brave, unregulated mouth
Sometimes (perhaps most times) having no opinion keeps you alive
Tell that to Patrice, to Sankara, tell it to poor Steve Biko,
The prince laid out bare in the back of a truck
Naked, defiant even in death, “Black is beautiful!”
Even more so when unclothed and manacled.
There will be no justice for the millions of hapless Africans
Shackled and tortured, irreversibly damaged,
Silenced and murdered, on the slave routes,
The harrowing pain and abuse suffered by those who made it over
Continues to haunt their children and extended offspring
And yes, lest we forget, insignificant Eric was one of them.
Who will cry for you now? Who will get your due?
A million online campaigns will not,
And CNN already closed your chapter in a brief, symbolic, staged debate
You are small fry, though,
In a world of inequity, controlled by the rich and the powerful few,
The owners of endlessly networked corporations,
The ones who make a profit from each conflict,
Who sell the guns and the bandages; train the doctors and the snipers,
Fund groundbreaking research and create new diseases
New vaccines and cures which must be sold, be sold, be sold
The shadowy men who hide under the guise of philanthropy
To inflict pain, disease and death on others,
The tech barons who support the development
Of agro-seeds that do not re-grow
Who, with their celebrity friends, love Africa more than the Africans
And who, one day, we will celebrate as saviours
Due to our communal blindness, greed and selfishness
Oh, and let us not forget their agents –
Homegrown collaborators and gene-bearing returnees,
Set upon the land like locusts at harvest
You, who rape your mother at night and massage her wounds in daylight
You will get away with it; it’s written in the books.
There will be no justice for the unfortunates
Whose lives pay for our comforts – in the Congo, the Niger Delta,
And those other corners of the earth
Where natural riches have become a curse
A garland for those martyred
To line the pockets of a few.
There will be no justice for them as well –
Those killed and raped by the powerful, rampaging Assyrians;
By the British in the quest for empire –
Cloak and dagger in the Middle East, massacres in India
By America in the ongoing tyranny,
By the Germans, the Russians and the Allies in WW1 and 2
For the bestiality of the Turks upon the Armenians
And the unimaginable horror of life in apart-hate South Africa
No questions for you China, queen of the Orient –
You’ve been demonized truly and well enough
And much of it proper.
There will be no justice for the children of Biafra,
Caught in a battle between immature, cocky belligerents –
Little men to who power fell without adequate preparation,
Pawn in Europe’s game
Heady times, man, those were heady times
What’s the loss of a few million children? Fewer mouths to feed, man.
Crush them all I say, Black Scorpion, crush ‘em all
Shoot them all, Ojukwu, the bloody federalists and saboteurs all together!
Ironic, how ruthless Murtala became a hero
And we are not allowed to sing Nzeogwu’s name.
“History is a mongrel”, you say?
There will be no justice
For the victims of the many border, ethnic and religious wars
That belittle Africa in the eyes of her sister continents.
Those who carved her up, blinded by avarice
No longer walk the earth; their progeny keep up the pressure
They give you a tenner and grab a million.
Fools of the Dark Continent, may your tribes increase –
No, actually they won’t, not with your frequent wars of attrition
And belly-first model of social engineering.
There will be no justice for all these abused women
Cradle of conflict, item of plunder
Maiden of vengeance, recumbent spoil of war
Mother of combatants, you bear the scars don’t you?
And you pass them on to the children
That the cycle of violence, in the name of liberty and glory,
May never be breached.
There shall be no justice for Cannabis, the food of mad men and geniuses
Coffee makes you thin, keeps you sharp (and it is not a controlled drug!)
Coca Cola makes you fat, keeps you trendy
It fuels the Olympics, makes you go faster, higher, further, etc.
Makes you believe any falsehood; you feel good
Someday, you Cannabis, will be free too of your jailers
But it may be too late for the revolution, you see…
There will be no justice (or equal rights) for you
Monsieur Pete, commander of cannabis, champion of it.
You were smart enough not to demand peace,
For there shall be none of that either.
There will be no freedom, no truth, and no justice –
(When, in the long history of the world,
Did you ever hear of their existence?)
In limbo, the reluctant newborn peruses the idiocy
Of an existence blighted by hate and shackled by gluttony
The Leader of the Free-World smiles from the screen
He sends out his bombs and killer squads in the name of justice
Hurray! The Free-World smashes the Un-Free-World into smithereens
The child knows better – freedom is a mirage
Those who seek its shape must travel in time
Go back in Ma’s womb if you know what’s good for you.
There will be no salvation, no deliverance…
Courage, like a noose around the neck,
And all that can be hoped for is the opportunity
To face one’s demise like a man
See you in Hell then!
“There is no Hell,”
What d’you mean there is no Hell?
We live in it, man!
Face to the future then, whatever it brings.
