Twelve criminals get around a table

Da Vinci paints them

We call it the last supper

Twelve black men get together

They sit &  eat

Police tell them to keep it moving

Is nothing holy when we feast?

I guess our grace ain’t cutting it

 

 

//

 

Some of you pretend you care,

But you don't

Activist on the outside

Indifferent on the inside

 

'Cause you got God, right?

The lord is your shepherd

So, you shall not want,

For anything, right?

 

You don't even mourn the death no more

Just try to fit in at the funeral

You'll just mourn the poet

Mourn the messenger

 

Conceptualize your outcry

'til there's no reason to cry at all

Look... there it is

Then, you're over it

 

Like dead bodies

don't move you no more

It takes art

Don't embrace reality no more?

 

What you thinking about, then?

You just thankful for life,

When you pray, right?

'Cause you ain't mothered death

 

Palms together

Looking like shaking mortality

You not thinking about nothing

But gratification and making it back home

 

Scared of inevitability

Yall just as scared

Just as scared as the killers

 

Killers that aren't Black

Killers who see me and see an animal

So, killers just kill us

 

But, ain’t human just another animal?

Born with no venom

So, we turn to weapons

Quick as cobras

 

But, yall just ammunition

Working with the machine,

Without even knowing

Like no empathy

 

Only civilized

when it comes to letting go

Like them guns

That took our sons...

//

When you kill a black boy

You are freeing another spirit
 

To interrupt the racism in a bullet

Make all this black more dense

Like an impenetrable cloak of ancestors.

 

So, don't fear lightly

Fear with precaution.

This africanity the greatest privilege.

 

To know that they aren't looking down,

But, are walking with you

Is to know we may lose this battle,

But, hate will never win the war.

 

Because no weapon formed

against us shall prosper.

 

Like, "don't shoot,"

my hands are up

 

Like rope ladders fell from the heavens

Like "no... at least send ashes to Africa,

So I can die in my mother's arms

Before my eyes roll over the concrete"

 

Like I got up off my knees

And started praying with my feet

When the cop told me "up..."

Like the mighty race I am

 

Like the trigger squeezed

But, the gun jammed

and it was a mysterious way

Like my walk home nearly every day

 

Like can I get a witness

On this block tonight?

 

Like I was still a son

Because I am

 

Like Mike Brown still walks, with us,

Because he does

 

Like Life and miracles

Weren't mutually exclusive

And neither had to be considered miracle

Like God is a Good God

 

Like we're still overcoming

Like an unending negro spiritual

 

And if there is a heaven

I've already seen those pearly gates

 

They resides in the mouths

of those that speak justice

And my story

And their own lives

 

For then, we live eternally

Like the weapon never prospered

 

Like emancipated souls

Black souls

Impenetrable black

Fear with precaution