A Little Bit of Change

Excuse me sir can I have some change?
Excuse me miss can I have some change?
Excuse me can I have some change?

Have you ever tried to find metamorphosis in a cup
Hoping that you could drink enough butterflies to believe that the world could love again?
Have you ever tried to keep your head up with eyes full of anchors?
A castaway living in a sea made of crocodile tears.

Trying to teach yourself how to sleep on concrete pillows and cardboard mattresses.
Praying for the days that a smile can find you.
It becomes easy to find the rain in clouds of judgment.
Look what we’ve become.

We have not yet learned how to become the revolution we believe in.
Outraged by pictures of a reality we don’t even know.
The world’s suffering can be recorded in ten seconds.
Which is only long enough for our attention to span into the next crisis.
But not long enough for us to realize that we’re eating our own sickness.

We’ve learned how to become our own parasites.
Writhing in the languished stomach of our own complacency.
Dining on the entrails of our own misunderstanding.
Faith has become a suicide jumper.

This land has become a crashing.
And we’ve become too comfortable with living in wreckage.
He remembers his life.
The one he had before he taught himself how to die.

His children would not see their memories on his face.
He wanders the streets looking for the person he was before time bent his smile backwards.
Before his wife planted her last kiss on his fertile soul.
Before the corporate layoff.

Back when society believed that he was a person.
Nobody sees riches when they’re wearing rags.
Who wants to take time to find goldmines buried in landfills?
Yet we passed her everyday.

She was a straight A medical student.
You would often catch her volunteering to feed the homeless.
Now some days she has to dig through trash hoping for treasure.
Hoping that her cup could hold enough blessings to make it through the day.
Her story could be told in numbers.
Her pages are bound to loans she can never pay.
Yet people act as if her title is enough to cover her chapters.
As if wanting more for herself makes her less than the person she is.

These are the forgotten.
The gnarled syllables of an unspoken language.
The tattered remnants of a conversation we don’t want to have.
Sometimes the cost of compassion is only a little bit of change.

There’s always an opportunity to plant hope within the fertile canvas of our lives.
To paint an eloquent smile across the landscape of another person’s face.
To breathe a robust destiny into the minds of those who’ve lost their hearts.

Today we have the chance to create tomorrow.
Today we have the power to inspire faith.
Today we can find it within ourselves to change the world.

It’s been a long time coming.
But I know a change gon come.
Oh yes it will.