Raise Men, Not Martyrs (WWOP Slam 2014)
If a black teen is murdered
and there’s no one around
to hear the sound
was it really murder at all?
Three to four hours
after he was shot
and killed
Michael Brown’s body
was left out in the open
discarded
like Emmett Till
and slowly
the masses began to gather
swarming
vultures picking him clean
to the bone
until he was white
white enough to have lived
to have not been shot in the first place
his ivory bones exposed
for all the world to see
to be fought over.
He was turned into scraps
thrown onto the pile of wrongful deaths
that has been rotting beneath the very same sun
that saw human beings
brought over on slave ships
and you wonder
you scratch your head and wonder
why a person my age and color
would say that enough is enough
would say that I’m tired of hearing what
“My people” went through
would say that I’m tired
of it being used as an excuse
to throw teenage boys to the slaughter
to turn another teenage boy into a martyr
yes
I am tired
tired of wondering
that if my fifteen year old brother
put his hands behind his head
and dropped to his knees
and he screamed
and he screamed
would it help him to not be
just as black as he seemed?
Would the fact that he
is a single shade lighter than me
be enough to ensure that
he continued to breathe
that his heart still beat?
If a black boy is shot out
in the middle of the street
and there’s no one around
to see him knocked off his feet
is this nation still one of equality?
I am tired
so very tired
of hearing about the war on terror
when there is clearly a war being raged
on color.
Sometimes I wish that I could rip
the skin off of my back
because gunshots
are nothing but
whip cracks
and zip-ties
nothing but nooses
around young black men’s necks.
Emmett Till
Medgar Evers
James Chaney
George Stinney
Travon Martin
Ezell Ford
Michael Brown
the list is endless—
and it isn’t getting any shorter
you want to choke our boys
with the very same bandages
you used to wrap them in
smother them
so that even in death
they can’t speak
can’t breathe
these
are the things
that pile up bodies in the street
the sound of a thousand promises
that sink
we were told that we were free
we were told about a dream
but it seems
that the color of our skin
will always determine
the color of our character.
So we will be beasts,
throats thick with fury
and nostrils spitting fire
we will rip your regime
limb from limb
and then
perhaps the sounds
of your own screams
will remind you of how human
we all used to be.
I am tired of teens
adorning mother’s warnings
like armor
just to walk down the street
and you seem to think
that this isn’t happening...
How many more black boys
have to die
how many more poems do we have to write
before this
is considered genocide?