Outcasts

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On this side

of the wall (that dissevers

the equals from the not-so), people

go about their lives, obsessed

with plastics and silicon

implants;

with hybrids,

gadgets, and autos; and they talk

music, art, cinema and literature;

democracy and politics

of the new world, even social equality

and justice at times

over high teas or lunches

in coffeehouses and rotisseries, or sometimes

even in Ritz for a good cause

can be expensive and this is all pro bono

anyway. And while they build lives –

mostly their own –

and climb the social ladder,

or perhaps live an illusion

of climbing,

And while they boast

on forums and hold parleys,

where they debate

things that are supposed

to have substance and meaning 

like some agonists verbalizing

in a superfluous ripple of emotions

in a schlocky roadside play.

And while I write this 

poem, let us say 

sitting in my room overlooking

that wall,

there is another class

of people, right across,

by a pond

into which drains

the filth

and sewage of my townsfolk –

a natural flow from the clean

to the unclean – that manures

the growth

of a culture of millions

of mossies. They struggle

to live in a city

of smutty hovels, packed

with battalions of filthy

children in ragged

clothes and with pale

esurient eyes; a colony of the haunted –

by want and penury – dwelling always

in the phantoms of blackwater

fever.

And I am reminded

of the ghettoes

for only this month

five of those filthy

children died –

a change for the better,

as it lessens the burden

on our bourgeois superegos

and mother earth, of course.