He walks along the familiar streets
Passing familiar faces
Waving, smiling, shaking hands
It is night as they smile back
Leaving him unable to see
The devil’s gaze behind those eyes
For looks really can kill
And they will tonight
They embrace like normal
As he is numb to the daggers in his back
He goes with them
They’re his friends
Yes, the white man’s friendship
Is always inticing, isn’t it?
He’d follow them to hell and back
In brotherhood he accepts
What they hand to him
They all inhale
Yes, the white man’s world
Is always intoxicating, isn’t it?
Their muscles relax
Enough to make it fun and easy for them
And enough to numb him
To their stares and grins
“ya know kid, u’re funny…
Always were one of the cool niggers”
His smile relaxes as he notices
A tattoo on one of their arms
he’d never seen before
“let’s play a little game, boys”
He’s caught off guard
Like Hampton
Trying to rise to his defense
Like a Panther
As their fists knock him to the ground
Knuckles tattooed COINTELPRO
He’s barely conscious
They must have slipped me something
He thought
“I have to go to work tomorrow”
He mutters
“TOMORROW?!
Oh there is no tomorrow for you,
Boy…
It ends now”
They beat his face
Like our streets
Knock the wind out of him
Like deflated dreams deferred
He raises an arm to shield himself
And they bind him
His fingers are cut
Paying the old price of literacy
While the beating never ends
He bears the pain
But can’t help but cry out
Like the street’s son-less mother
“stop cryin boy!
Do those girls in the videos cry?!”
His tongue is cut
To silence him like Malcolm and Huey
Next are his eyes
“now we’ll make you as blind
As you’ve kept yourself”
And his ears
“hell, not like you were usin’ ‘em,
But we will
And keep ‘em
To remember you by”
He can yet smell the gasoline
That they’ve doused him with
Where they’ve brought him to
Under the cover of darkness
Castrating him
“let’s see how many lil
Bastards u make and leave
Without these”
Lives snatched from him
No wonder he still holds his own
“we’re gonna light ya!
Like Watts, Detroit
And the words of Leroi Jones”
He tries to scream
“no, you don’t have to do…”
choking on his own blood
Faintly hearing the matches struck
He braces himself
Like a boy in the 9th ward,
Watching the water rise
They toss them at his Dunks
The flames rise quicker
He tosses and flails
Like an addict in withdrawl
without methadone
reaching towards the heaven
he was taught to be eternal
but was never sure existed
hoping this trouble won’t last always
and boy, are they laughing
“BURN NIGGER!
Like the hoop dreams of your children!
Like AIDS burns your women!
Like bullets tearing through young innocent flesh!
BURN SLOW!”
One of them stomps out the flames
Like the hopes of the young hustler
Behind bars 25 to life,
To get a good picture while he smolders
Like grumblings of revolutions lost
In this grotesque, contorted form
They take his body for a last joyride
Tied to the back of the truck
On this jagged road
And one by one
His limbs roll away
Beginning with his head
Leaving a trail of what was once
Beautiful Blackness
