If I had power

real power

I'd change the idea

that cruelty

is power.

 

Unneccessary unkindness

is a concept that I thought

had expired in middle school but

apparently not

as I witness my peers

tearing into one another

for sport.

 

In the library during midterms

frantically memorizing AP terminology

only to overhear

shrill voices 

condemning a girl for not drinking

only to ask those voices to please

please grow a little softer

some people are trying to study

only to be ridiculed later

to make such a suggestion.

 

Standing on a train platform

grand central

midnight on a tuesday

listening to girls

laugh at

make fun of

a girl that had passed out

urinated on the concrete

vomited on her 

pretty pink skirt

blue-haired girls cackling

in the face of another's pain.

 

Listening to a story recounted 

by a fourteen year old girl

told to her by a thirteen year old boy

about his big brother

his role model

who enjoys taking nerds out to bars

getting them wasted

and leaving them alone

high fiving buddies as he leaves 

a joke stranded 

unsafe.

 

What is good

what is fun

what is so intriguing about

causing senseless pain

about poking fun and

throwing cruel words

at those who did not do a single thing

to harm you?

 

If I could change 

one little thing

it would be

the unkindness

people show

one another.

And the reasons

that people

feel they  need

to be unkind 

in the first place.