Dust biting

Grandpa and grandson walk down the hall
their heads hanging low,
Aint no sound but the sound of their feet
Syringes ready to go.
Are you ready? Hey, are you ready for this? ((In the EU excess mortality has risen by 40% in 2022. Just in Portugal the mortality among youth reached record highs this year. Lots are biting the dust.))
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway
You hear some thumps
the sound after heart attacks neat.

How do you think
We‘re gonna get along
When the old and the young
are all gone?
They take us for everything
we have
And kick us out of our own.
They‘re still not happy
Nor satisfied
Till we are nothing but skin and bones.
How long will we stand the heat?
Out of the doorway
Anyone drops dead
to the sound of Fauci‘s bleat.

There are plenty of ways
That you can kill us all
and grind us into the ground.
You can beat us,
You can cheat us.
Stick a tube in us
and leave us to drown.

Were we ready,
were we ready for you.
Had we stood on our own two feet,
then maybe bullets, not in us
But in you would rip.
Repeating to the sound of the beat.

Finally one of you bites the dust,
One of you bites the dust.
Hey, we have to get you!

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..