ER

Our lungs are broken windshields
Spider webbing over desecrating organs
Probably because we live in an urban desert
Where death erupts from spouts of metal
Infinite black smoke stacks
Crawling out of chrome barrels
 breeding a slow and festering demise

Factories and freeways pepper my neighborhood
The air I breathe has a rustic aftertaste
The only ground my feet are familiar with is this uneven and splitting concrete
The only faces I see are a sad and ebbing brown

We are Impoverished
Can't afford luxuries like healthcare and groceries
Yet we break our backs and our banks daily just to breathe
Can't afford emotional or physical stability
Yet we struggle to stay afloat in slick and oily water
But these 3 lettered white men
stealing our lives with lifeless hands
don't care
They shit in our back yards
And then throw toilet paper at us in apology
But how do you apologize for a genocide

Black people are twice as likely to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest threat
and 5Xs as likely to live near a power plant or chemical facility

Motherfuckers are plagued by two sewage plants, 4 power plants, the world’s largest food distribution plant, and over 60,000 trucks per week
Lynching the community daily
With a noose of man-made plants
Leaving us swaying in dry smog

Across the country
we are surrounded by 2 freeways, a shipping port, and dozens of factories
Cornered by industrial bloodhounds
Constantly feeding on empty pockets and failing respiratory systems

Proof is in our past
We are not disposable
We are an erupting volcano
Melting your perceptions of pride
We built this nation from a pile of dust
with worn fingertips, callused palms, and flayed backsides
We are the soles of America's shoes
Her shaking equilibrium

But we've always been the first to parish
And the last to get credit
Always been the scape goats, and the collateral damage
The after thought
The unwilling sacrifices at the hands of lesser men

I don't expect you to care
Very few have
After this viscous pattern of mutilation
I have realized
That in this system
Dying slowly is inevitable