20/30

shout above venomous city din / Streets are wilding in the morning, the / crack of dawn in the scream / evening in the earthen underbelly that drips / From a day’s dark’ning wires there is / A frail hand gesticulating above a pulpit / patron saint of socialist uncle, roars of the old / Generation of street dwelling private schoolers / spitting across the teeth and red in the face / he speaks younger like magic, tongue like / populist, verdict sweet and short but it all / seems so obvious. We love / that which gives us comfort, that which /does not name until prompted twice black women killed by police we / are forgetting what we learned last week it spills / out of the minds like wind and it is Tuesday / the other side of the coin takes stage / opens the decade old playbook redesigned / For Twitter fingers and she sits and tells us / Beyonce’s lyrics apply to me too / I can still steal black art/ Ruin culture at light speed/with heavy hand on Tabasco bottle/uncork cap / drink tears / make you wish Obama had 4 more years / see it’s just / Like magic marker erasure / Pen minus men and paper O how / did we get here /from the streets ofMissouri / are we all deaf / are our heads so deep in the pavement stained with the blood of low level drug offenders / so deep in apathy when the children have pigment / so deep in comfort and escapism from our own obvious mediocrity/ so deep we forgot to breathe / so deep we forgot to apologize / so deep our own bodies invert / so deep the whiteness is and infinite and peculiar being / so deep the being is our mind, is our body, is our soul / captured and bound / by absolutely nothing