Already Grown

Math takes your confidence

Terrorizes your innocence

Intelligence

Questions you

Making you wonder

Is my education a fluke

Trapped in the desk

Teacher says

Twelve minus two

Ten is as close to you

Fourteen in two years

Seventh grade

Middle School

All these kids around me

But they don’t know

All I can think of

Is that boy

Black and beautiful

Shot and killed

As a child of seventeen

Math is no game

But I sat there and thought

Fourteen in two years

Am I closer to getting shot?

Fourteen minus three

Eleven is as close as

Seventeen

Realizations came more

What is a child?

Privileged

Melanin deprived

Snow White

Society defined

Defined by age

Only of importance

When considered a child

Under the ever-growing

Jim Crow doctrine

So it was that day

After hearing that story

And many more like it

That I knew

To you

I would never be a child