Your perception of me pre-existed, you saw black and you felt danger, you saw my skin and with it painted a personality from the prejudice of your mind.

You don’t know me, yet you assume that I am just like every other dark skinned man out there.

So that is why I feel angry when you cram yourself in the corner of elevators, if you could only realize I am the one who is truly backed into a corner, provoked by your ignorance, until I become what you painted me.

With your judging eyes, cautious smiles, and nervous actions you made me this way when in the beginning I was just me. Now after all you have done, and all I have done, I’m just trying to be me again.
I just want to be me.

As human as you.
As real as you.
Just not so happy as you,
because of you...

Oh you and your **** belief!
Oh you and your huge cynicism!
Oh you and your small mind!

No form of love is wrong;
wrong is your prejudice, my friend.
Because on the inside we're like this:
no differences finally

Oh, go, Peter, go tell him!
Oh, go, Lucio, go own him!
Oh, go, Renato, go love him!

I don't see why so many worries:
the heart belongs to him, just to him.
Your hostility worries me
and your words scares me.

Oh understand him like a friend yours!
Oh, accept him like a brother yours!
Oh love him like a son yours!

They've been living in a nightmare.
They're always living in a nightmare.
It's always a nightmare in their minds.
Could that nightmare finish?

Oh, Peter, don't go; because loving is not fatal!
Oh, Lucio, don't hide; because you're not an animal!
Oh, Renato, don't be sad; because wrong is not being sentimental!

Twice the fool is the runaway
Who hides his trail, as he hides his ache
All bottle and pills, temporary sleep
Insomniac daze and cheap dinner meals

Static lies on a stationary screen
Radio chatter can’t feed the famine in me
The world is aflame
With no one awake

Sunrise slumber
I fall unconscious to the restless on midnight pavement
Breaking bones or breaking bottles
Selling skin or dealing dust to lost souls
Hearts tucked and folded from the cold

Future oblique
I dare you, predict my dreams
Late riser / never bloomer

Packs a bag, a change of clothes
To deadbeat joints, and dead end posts
Been as many years gone as daily cigarettes smoked

Bloodshot symmetry eyes
I see in every passerby
Like the whole city gone up and left their troubles behind,
You and I

We’re cerebral projections
Locked into motor whirs, recursive disintegration
Status acknowledged, clean cut
Black and white since day one

Mould breaker, you’re told you’re out of line
Gutter graves or veins, stay your place or fall behind
The only constant is the throne
You sit upon or come to view as your body’s own
The red light stare, blue flicker flares
Blare on your skin, like prisms, colour wear
Better to fade to grey than know yourself
For what you truly are, just a shade of catch and tell

Dire straits
No deviation
Full advance
Or desolation
Empty eyes
Golden restraints
I don’t want wealth
I just want change

I heard you blister
You swarmed as the daylight broke
Cross distant lands, tattered
Tumultuous, flayed
Burrowing deep into rot

You’ve beaten the broken
You’ve flayed the dead silence
Into a gutter-mouthed cry
Of humanities darkest

Raging a storm
So long
You’ve swallowed hell and heaven whole

Nothing is left anymore

When you spit out the darkness
You bare your soul
And I can see
Hate has swallowed you whole

Within that magical moment
The world is at one and at ease
Everyone is loving their neighbour
And we have control of disease.

But it doesn't last, it cannot last
It will all go back as before
To the dying from hunger and violence
To man’s unending desire for war.

One man plants a crop for food
But another man reaps the gain
The one making life from the profit
While another’s reward is just pain.

That man is black, or yellow, who cares!
His blood like yours is red
The bullets or knives that pierce your skins
Would make you both as dead.

A man gets beaten in the street
His crime was being gay
Who gave those others the right to judge
Will prejudice never go away?

The ones with strength to dominate
Should nonetheless take heed
When they themselves are wanting help
Who’ll stay to fill that need.

I hear the ever-growing rains
They flood the town and field
Where hardship’s felt so gravely
Where man is forced to yield.

Perhaps we brought it on ourselves
We feel the need for so much
But there are so many more with nothing
Who’d benefit from a gentle touch.

Back to that magical moment
It’s the one just before I awake
Where the next moment comes and it’s over
And it can’t be put right with a shake.



©Joe Wilson – A Magical Moment…and then it’s gone! 2014

My mind roams through a wilderness
Of imagination,
Only to reach a wrought-iron wall
At my lips.
The filters of polite society won't let me
Speak,
Won't let me scream "*******!"
To their soft-mannered prejudices
That gather in the bottom of glasses of
Expensive champagne.