If you don’t want to inflame via images of the behavior
then you have to stop the behavior.
—Maggie Nelson, “The Art of Cruelty”
Amerikkka has trouble
identifying Black during the day. We be
a lot too arrogant,
& a little too fuckin’ wise (justifies the splayed
chalk-outlined body &
the po-lice chief
lies into the microphones,
that is repeated by the media-
labeled us criminal, law-
breaking thugs, or
demons) a post-racial meta-
phor communist radical militant outside agitator,
redeems hate
as a politically correct nicety
that kills from the inside out.
But we have our own given names
that sound nothing like
thug or demon
extensive furtive movements or
resisting arrest.
(Our drowning
in racial profiled
while everyone watches)
The accumulated cell-phones,
brandished to looky-lou
what body cams seem to never catch.
The police choke-hold &
handcuffed the prone body
been shot eight times,
twittered subliminal
across the social media. The post-Citizen Picnic
of crowd amassed
after the child made to be still
& like it,
crossed out/ over, or Lord no!!!
gone to a better place?
Crossed Jordan,
from where he,
she,
them/ they
never really were or wanted to be,
& the internal investigation
ruled “justifiable” as dying while Black.
But you’ll find us
on the jobs no one else wants to do,
our statures hunched downward,
the weighted gravity of Diaspora square pegs
forced to fit Eurocentric round holes, &
the open-mouthed coal of our dissent,
like a car crashed mangle of metal
around our telephone pole smolder of umbrage. You’ll find us
at the flashpoint of
po-lice manhandled &
riot, our upraised fists still pugilistic as sass;
an affinity for disobedience with a rock in one hand,
a T.V., a pair of status-brand sneakers,
or Molotov Cocktail, in the other. You’ll find us
against the odds
(a generalization of stereotype) on the corner of
Hope St. & Chance,
a fifteen clip heater in one hand &
a penitentiary twenty pop in the other.
You’ll find us in your Nigger lease work farms,
the jail house, prison or
on parole.
You’ll find us cooling on metal gurneys
in your morgues,
an historical passenger
in someone else’s landscape. You’ll find us
at another funeral,
wearing a T-shirt
bearing the graduation picture of the deceased. Our cell-phones
at 90 degrees to our grief, texting a hash tag: #blacklivesmatter,
one to the other:
#sayhername.
Amerikkka has trouble
identifying Black during the day,
because we are as many as they can think of,
plus one more;
so they watch very closely at night.
________
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, a spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time.
Photo by Slon V Kashe.
________
