A Soldier's Story: Spoken Word

For the Soldiers who return home to poverty.

Can I borrow a dollar?
Can I borrow a dollar?
Can you spare a dollar please?
Can you spare a dollar please?
If you can spare a dollar than you can spare your child's innocence 'cause I swear that it's at risk because you can't spare to share a cent. 
Understand there's a man outside, with a sign, a lost mind, and not a dime to his name.
His skin withers away in the cold rain and sweat tosses away his calorie intake as the sun stains heavily on his skin. 
There's a man outside, that's confined by society, denied by a world that's to blind to acknowledge their own bias.
So of course, he finds a way to never spend a second in sobriety and the fire burns inside of he to live outside of his lonesome, fulsome, bitter, harsh,  clawing, gnawing, gnashing its teeth, quick pulse creating, depressive stained reality.
There's a man outside that is dying because our eyes are so demeaning that he's retreated to believing that nobody can care enough to excuse him from that category.
The same category as that minority that was hassled, hung, and hated before you ever knew their story.
There's a man outside that marched side by side with commanders and landed planes softly on enemy lands to protect and serve people that are deathly evil and show little to no respect for the tale that made him nomadic. 
This man has seen bodies fly like bullets, soldier cry like toddlers, best friends die like epidemics, and bloods so crimson that his nightmares are painted in red silhouettes, red shadows, and red sanctuaries. 
He's stuck inside this bloody thirsty synthesis nightmares that could shake the heart of strong men until their locked into this system of emptiness. 
How can a man get a job if he's constantly on the battlefield? 
How can a man ever recover if he's constantly hearing shattered steel? 
How can a man change his life, if he's life a laughing matter or a judgmental chatter to the people that he protected only for it to wreck his sensitivity? 
Now, that's traumatic. 
This is our society, laughing at that class of superb morality, that nomadic variety that never had a choice, but join the cause and then, surrender their all. 
Now, there's a man outside who's passing away, shrinking to decay and on the side of these streets a weary bucket of bones will lay. 
A bucket of bones that will hold no censorship, enclose no membership with no indifference.
With a letter for the world stating, 
The real war is within our own walls. 
The real war beats recklessly in our hearts. 
The real war cheats oppressively from the start.
The real war needs never to feel compassion.
The real war is forever and everlasting.
The real war is traumatic.
The real war comes from people that see an opportunity to make a change, but our selfishly chained to their false ideology. 
So, Can I borrow a dollar?
So one day, your kids won't have to see The Soldier's Story. 
Can I borrow a dollar? 
So one day, your child can still believe in America's Glory.
So, Can I borrow a dollar?
So one day, your kid won't have to see that America's Gory.
So one day, you can admit that you weren't selfish, that you have helped this war torn world, by providing a meal for a man that sits outside still, writing his own will on cardboard boxes.