It’s Just a Joke
‘It’s just a joke’,
but is it still just a joke when you shout it across the street?
‘It’s just a joke’,
meanwhile we are cautious of every guy we meet.
‘I didn’t mean it’,
but do you mean it when you treat us like some sort of bet?
‘I didn’t mean it’,
but did you mean it when you used violence as a threat?
It’s just a joke, until it turns into more.
Is it just a joke… or is it what you secretly long for?
You joke about our ‘place’,
must be easy when you’re at the top and we are at the base.
You joke about rape,
while we are silenced as if with tape.
Your jokes construct a cage that locks us away,
isolates us from you so you don’t hear what we have to say.
We are not your equals we are targets,
we stand frozen and your jokes are bullets.
To us it’s not a joke.
It’s not a joke,
when we say we live in constant fear.
it’s not a joke,
when we say ‘no’ and you act like you don’t hear.
And maybe it is just a joke,
and you really didn’t mean it.
But for us it’s a shot in the dark,
for which category you fit:
enemy or friend?
Will this ever end?
Your jokes form our reality,
and that’s something you will never see.