Somewhere in America a teen boy is smuggling heroin into his school and selling it to his peers.
His siblings are grateful for the food he helps put on the table.
Somewhere in America a teen girl sits on her bed and injects herself with enough heroin to kill her just like her father did years ago.
Her mother really hoped she wouldn't follow in his footsteps.
In America, drugs like heroin and opioids claimed the lives of 772 teenagers in 2015, and we're just all sitting here gawking at the scene on Facebook instead of doing something about it.
Somewhere in America, a 16-year-old boy pops off at his neighbor down the street for wearing a different colored bandana than him.
His initiation is complete and he now wears the color blue everywhere.
Somewhere in America, a girl cries over her older brother's dead corpse because he
forgot to pay the local gang the money for the drugs he took last week.
It's now paid for in blood and tears.
In America these are some signs that your child may be in a gang:
They show signs of suspicious behavior
They get disrespectful and rebellious
They hide stuff from you and don't want you to go through their things
Their skin color is darker than the kids on the other side of the city
Somewhere in America, a Muslim girl sits alone at her school's lunch table while the Christian girls sit down a row from her and talk about how she might be a terrorist.
Her father is being held in custody because ICE agents thought he was a terrorist.
Somewhere in America, a Latino boy is being harassed by men in a pickup truck with the rebel flag on the back while he walks home from school; they're yelling at him to go back to Mexico.
He only wishes he can go back to Mexico and see his mother again.
In America, African American teenagers face violence three times more than our own white kids. Now tell me, America, tell me how that is right? Because that kid's not white? Because he's not white he can be abused at home, on the street, and by the prison system set up against him.
Somewhere in America, a colored boy sits inside a jail cell for a crime he did not commit.
His mother wishes he could come home soon, even though he never will.
Somewhere in America, a black boy is lying dead on a sidewalk, his body resembling swiss cheese because he had a cell phone in one hand and fear in the other.
His parents will never be able to hear him laugh again.
In 2010 a 16-year-old boy was accused of stealing a backpack. Even though many friends provided proof to his alibi he still went to one of the worst prisons in New York to await trial. Eventually, he was found innocent after three years of solitary confinement and suicide attempts. He was released and killed himself years later because he was paranoid that someone was watching him. The PTSD of prison crept through his young mind and took a stranglehold on his thoughts. It slithered down his spinal cord and twisted him into its own puppet. It fed him lies that pushed him to the point of no return; and to think this all could have been prevented if Kalief's skin was the color of snow. The thing is, all snow has a little dirt in it.
Somewhere in America, a gay teenager is sitting on the street homeless because his father thinks God hates gays.
The teen wishes his father would just take a minute to understand.
Somewhere in America, a transgender girl is too scared to use her school bathroom.
Little does she know she's not the only one in her school who's terrified of public places.
In America a transgender daughter is rejected by her parents, she's now thirteen times more likely to commit suicide than that of a normal teenager. In America, the unchecked discrimination against LGBT keeps them from receiving housing, jobs, and healthcare; keeps them from reaching for their dreams in the land of freedom and opportunity. Is that really what we're still calling it?
Somewhere in America a teenager sits in their room and writes about the bad parts of America. They write about things they know personally because they have felt the hands of racism, the hands of discrimination, the hands of violence, the hands of drugs grab their shoulders and yank them back from what was promised to them; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. None of which they will have because in America they'll always be victim to their own religion, victim to their own race, victim to who they decide to love, victim to the substances they put into them, victim to the violence they are segregated with, and victim to who they decide to identify as.
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Poetry of a Young Mind
PoetryIt's exactly what it sounds like. My teachers and friends have pushed at me for years to expose my poetry to more than just them and myself so....that's what this is. I actually don't write a lot of poems about being Trans, but you might find one o...
