POETRY: Mistakes by Reggie Drake

Mistakes.

errors that can easily be erased on pad, but in life,

You live with the decisions you make.

Its a shame young and foolish are associated in the same breath.

DUI's result in lost lives when, unfortunate souls are stampeded upon by gaudy gas guzzlers with drivers thinkin "my bad", then dash off like nothing happened;

Like there isn't a man or a woman laying in the street covered in their own blood;

Like there isn't one less person in the world.

You do the crime but you pay for it in your mind cuz your conscience won't allow you to forget the unforgettable and avoid the moans and wails of the deceased etched into the fabric of your mind.

Maybe its better to die than to live on in a world of habitual sin, where prejudices prevent friendships and,

Violence is ready to bust out at every corner..... like gang gunfire and deadly drive-bys.

Yea you've seen it, friends lashin out with verbal bullets and knives about somethin somebody told someone else.

Superfluous retellings that distort and deform the message until it is nothing like the original.

Black on black crime;

All those years of fighting to gain freedom and what do we do when we obtain it?

we fight and destroy one another,

making a mockery of the sacrifices those before us made.

Suffering for days upon days so that we could see the land of the free as it was meant to be.

Would we take it back if we could?

Would the scrupulous thief rob that same store if he knew 10 years later it would land him in prison for life?

Old men lay motionless on their deathbeds wishing they could turn back the hands of time and tell that one special person how much they loved them.

Would the rigid turn soft?

Men tough like a brick wall claiming crying makes a man soft.

Sometimes you have to cry to release the pain brought upon by the heavy hand of the world on your shoulders.

Sometimes you have to cry when life gives you more than you can take and the frailty of your flesh can't bear the weight.

You had to cry before you could walk when the doctor spanked you on your bottom to see if you were on the up and up.

We can't take back what we say or do because Time never stops;

It flows freely like a waterfall;

Past the turbulence it encounters along the way.

Regret is a weight that encumbers the soul for an eternity;

So live right and die old.....

And happy