A brown boy slumped in a third hand desk
in a shabby classroom in a crumbling school
in a graffiti scarred hood
looks down into a picture on half a page
in a textbook scribbled with crayon
and slips into a rain forest
of greenness, soft earth and shade
marbled by sunlight streaking
through a triple-canopy jungle
where pigmy children in loin cloths
laugh and play in a circle of huts
made of sturdy sticks and mud,
their mothers breast feeding babies
overseen by matriarchs stirring wooden bowls
and tiny men with spears standing guard,
in a picture in a torn and faded book
in a shabby classroom
where he daydreams himself inside a hut
asleep in the soft breezes of night
under a thatched roof of broad leaves
and nobody named Charles lurks outside
waiting to take him down