#SpreadTheWord

Tired.
|
Black babies wake up to generational trauma
White babies wake up to generational wealth
You tell me if we’re equal.
Injustice Watch (https://www.injusticewatch.org/spreadtheword/page/2/)
Poetry inspired by Injustice Watch reporting.
Black babies wake up to generational trauma
White babies wake up to generational wealth
You tell me if we’re equal.
The fear is painted across the cracked pavement underneath our feet. How many times have we walked over dried blood without knowing?
You feel so light.
You felt heavy.
Like a baby’s laugh.
Like a laugh, when I’m nervous.
Do you feel superior when the dawn breaks/or is it only when you see me/seemingly broken by the loaded words “strip search” /an unearthing of women and our resilience
Grief was a China Cabinet
And in her neighborhood
Everybody ate off plastic
Because it was safer for the children
I must have missed the day
they explained my genitals
became a weapon.
White draped robes surround me—fists and hands and stones. Hot winds of dusk stroke cheeks, cracked earth caresses my bare feet.
They marched on 18th street
They marched on 26th street
They marched on Division street
For Brown solidarity
With Black lives
Dark city nights where the police lurked
years ago pledged neighborhoods with a curse
confessions coerced
the young would catch it worse
decades later and I put em in a verse
free them
see their innocence used like instruments.
Like any good man, a black cop walks into my coffee shop
and asks for the strongest coffee we have
and assures me he wants it black.
I’m fumbling.