ramblings in rhyme

sometimes i just write in rhyme. most of the time, no one ever sees it. but i thought this one was funny, so i thought i'd share it with you. i wrote it this morning with virtually no edits. this is just what came out.

Old Saint Nick will pay us another visit this year
The fat old man with the red suit and white beard
Where did such a notion start
That we should love with the wallet and not the heart?

But yet again I am caught in the machine
Of PacSun jeans and corporate greed
When did I buy into the philosophy
That what I can purchase defines me?

It's all over the media, on MTV and BET
The pressures of a society that warps its imagery
To enslave our minds to hope that we
Can also be those things we see

A little poem is just a start
A shift in thinking that causes me to depart
From the typical mindset of a decaying generation
To the value set of the perfect incarnation

See Old Saint Nick will never leave
He's burned into the folklore of our society
It's a sad state of affairs and an indictment of ourselves
That instead of remembering the baby in the manger, we purchase the one on the shelves

I feel like it is up to me
To reshape the minds in my society
To dust off the stories of 3 wise men following a star through the sands
To find the one child that would rule all of the lands

Nativity scenes are a poor illustration
The white skinned perfect baby jesus is a figment of our imagination
The jesus i serve and follow today
Is not the one I see in that hay

Not that skin color matters, he could have been white black or blue
But haven't we swung history to look like we want it to
Maybe not me, or you, maybe not most of us here
But somewhere, sometime, that blue eyed jesus appeared

Perhaps I departed from where this poem began
Just ramblings from the brain of an ethnically challenged man
But wait? Old Saint Nick was a smiling fat white dude wearing red?
That sounds like me watching the UCLA/USC game, but I was crying instead

So I guess I'm done wasting the taxpayer dollar
I just started typing and this is what came out, holla
I'll leave you with one last thought, what I should have said to start off
Forget the trappings of our society and worship the child born in the trough