A Poem for Michael Brown Jr. - November 24, 2014

There are looks I know I’ll never know

Sentences I get to hear because of skin

Things elders tell me, that is just how it was

As if a change in years masking a sentiment changes the sentiment

It is the fear of men who know the system is built on bones

Bones decayed of flesh, drained of their blood

But centuries soaked you can still feel the color of the sin

That once housed them

Like when we close our eyes, in that darkness

Instead of infinite possibility, no defined lines

The lineage children of those bones know

That when eyes are closed instead of open, it is hopelessness

Hopelessness that there is a difference in what a system sees

When eyes are open that all that history pops

From the instinct of an officer of the law to how quickly

Gun down an unarmed man

It is the flinch-in like magnesium in a match primed to light

That the eyes of a father are closed to no other way to explain to his son

What can I tell you this is just how it is, will be, some iteration of always

When the colonizers took the Cherokee and the Sioux and wiped the slate

Tilled the soil and the definition of dirty hands

Grabbed into Africa for plows, the taint of that imprints behind closed eyes

Of how it was, of why, like shrapnel in a chain of the universe failing empathy

So that a soul of humanity as one whole through God

Keeps repeating the same lesson

That it is the fear in the flinch, of how one is judged in the personal sanctum

Of person, after human, after child being looked at differently with open eyes

Facing the hopelessness of what can be when they close their own

The mirror of one universal shared soul
Bleeding, calling, not to burn a building or shoot flesh

But to shed the preconceptions and regain the infiniteness 
In the darkness behind our lids

To which we were each born and tested in trials to dare see

Tested for a reason bigger than human