Franks Psychiatry 4 #59: alzheimer’s in the twenty-first century

didn’t christ say

what you do
to the least among you
you might as well be doing to me

I always thought
he was supposed to have said
something like that
I thought it might have meant
something real

~

I follow things
that politicians say
I listen through the newspapers

they all sound like such god-fearers
every one of them has faith
sometimes they fight about
who’s got the best

it seems a strange thing
to me
a kind of phenomenon

~

today I read another hard-luck tale
a follow-on
from the one about the mad-woman
they put in detention
then forgot about for a few months

they were going to send her
I believe
to some other lucky country

turned out she was one of us
all along

oh well
I guess sometimes
shit happens that way

but today I read
there’s another
this time they deported her
four years ago
and nobody’s seen her since

god only knows where she is now
or if she might be dead

she was one of ours too
slipped through
a safety net
meant to protect us
from the dirty unwashed
these boat refugees
who might be some kind of terrorists
except that most terrorists
I hear
arrive by aeroplane these days

~

sometimes
when I cast my eye
over the headlines
I feel despair
wonder why I’m battling the odds
to make my small shred of difference
when it hardly seems that anyone cares
anymore
about what happens to the least of us

making a difference
is no longer a measure
of what sort of people we are
or of who our parents were
before the alzheimer’s of this
terrorising twenty-first century
drew a veil
across our vision of justice
our sense of right

~

I believe tomorrow
I’ll stay home from work

it's not that I don't care
it's just that
I can’t find the heart
to face it

~