It’s not a small world after all

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” This poem was inspired along those same lines of thinking, and by my co-worker Joanne Zuhl at Street Roots.

We don’t live in a small world
One that goes without the grind

We don’t live in a small world
One that goes without giving 11O percent every god damn day
One that peels apart the layers of our brain
We don’t live in a small world
One that goes without the fourteen hungry mouths, waiting—
Navigating around the juiced out junkie
Looking to us for something we never possessed, it gets so funky

We don’t live in a small world
One that goes without the power brokers watching, waiting—
Waiting for us to slip up like Cinderella at the ball
One that goes without bouncing from worlds—
The wealthy and the wasted, the devilish and pasted
The jealous and tasted, the opinionated and faceless

We don’t live in a small world
One that goes without being scrutinized, filleted
Tossed out in the media like cheap used sneaker
Hailed and preserved, torn down, unnerved
Complimented and churned, tired and burned, out
We don’t live in a small world
One where the past matters nearly as much as the future
A heart recycled by politicians and dirty hands holding porno tokens

We don’t live in a small world
One that stops us from keeping our eyes upon a far away horizon—
One that lives without the wheels falling off
One that gathers any real meaning from above
One that offers a chance of reflection
One that allows us to truly be there for the unloved
One that brings us eye to eye with the Prince of Darkness and the Prince of Light
We hold it inside, hit our ceiling and drift off into the sublime
We reach our capacity, we hit the gas, we hit the brake

We don’t live in a small world
The one that offers an option to turn away
To step aside and be offered a priveledged choice to be frozen in nothing

by Israel Bayer