Zero Tolerance

Copyright © 2009 Judith J. Bentley

You pull out a hundred dollar bill for a 75 cent lunch.
“Ms. B, you make money like this?”
No, I come from the comfort of the cloistered corporate cocoon--
where our profits are kept in a city of style
Mother Teresa never visited.
We have zero tolerance for the likes of you
and the concentration camp we didn’t create
where you were orphaned and homeless, where you live
in boarded up buildings locked in rooms you will never leave.

And since your mother is a drug addict and prostitute
and your father’s permanent residence, the federal prison --
by the way, we’re making room there for you too--
you have nothing to look forward to.
There’s no one home to help you with your homework
and since you have been told you will never amount to anything,
you don’t do any. So let me see if you can spell “despair.”

Our new President explains that you were born into
“history’s confinement” where the poorest of the poor are housed,
a repository for the remaining legacy of slavery and violence,
where your daily bread is forced ignorance and internalized rage.
There are no jobs for you except the local street drug trade.
Over the brain dead megaphone, a stimulant or sedative we take
with our office cups of cappuccino or on the way home
to our suburban housewives, we occasionally hear how you’ve become
your own firing squad, saving us the trouble.
Otherwise, you attract little public notice
except when we see you slumped over
your schoolroom desk, your teacher’s arms folded tightly
across his chest. We would certainly not hold you.

In our committee conversations you are statistics
we consider with our tactics and rhetorical strategies.
We may alter our curriculum next year
to include civics lessons if it doesn’t cost too much.
That’s what a Harvard researcher says we should do.
She should know--she visited your classroom once
so she could write a book. Maybe it’ll be a best seller.

Well, I’m taking my kids to Italy next week.
It’s so cold in this City in the Winter.
But first, I’ll pray in church this Sunday,
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Now for that story I promised you.
“Once upon a time in a City called Calcutta.…”

[Note: Judith Bentley is a writer, poet and legal assistant in a national law firm headquartered in Richmond. She served as one of two lead teachers in Richmond’s first alternative school.]