I am the Rage Read online

  Orphaned by a nation that castigates us at every turn

  Looking to any individual acts of violence as

  A justification for a condemnation of an entire race

  How do we get to middle ground, the golden mean

  To find a way forward

  A way out of this never-­ending cycle of outright war and unfettered bloodshed

  A way out of this spiral toward the death of all things good

  Forward to a way of peace

  Armistice

  Without swallowing the bitter pill of business as usual, which only brings us back to strife

  How do we turn down the violence of us versus them

  Them versus US

  Mortal enemies on this battlefield of life

  What is the escape route from this labyrinth of animosity and remorse

  No one will yield

  who holds the secret unction that can heal the scars of a crippled nation

  How do we find the pathway to a new story

  And stop the reiteration of the old

  The story that has never furnished us with real hope for a better tomorrow

  And explodes or collapses on an extraordinarily regular and predictable path every time we play that old record

  Who will hear a new story

  A new narrative

  A new anecdote about how we can live in actual, factual harmony and altruism

  Before we destroy ourselves.

  Not Again

  I do not crave Your patronage

  As You suspect or hope

  While You grow weary of looking for plausible

  Ways to reach down

  Dirty Your hands

  To help me

  And my kind

  I do not seek Your ingenuity or input

  Into what will make my life better

  Or make it more like Yours

  While You test these newly-­formed but tenuous bonds of trust

  I refuse to be a party to Your abortive attempts to educate Yourself

  At my expense

  To understand the language of back-­lancing scars

  And spirit-­crushing humiliations

  To obtain knowledge I already possess

  To help you feel better about Yourself

  I will not enter into that turnstile of time

  With You another time

  Only to once again find myself ultimately lost

  Locked inside the same old prison

  Alone

  Again

  What should You do

  What do I suggest You do

  Find one child

  Lock yourself into his or her life

  Feel the darkness with them

  Educate them about the ways of Your world

  And help them navigate it

  For the days are sad

  And tomorrow is guaranteed to no one

  Especially not to a Black child

  Be Careful What You Ask of Me

  As we paddle life’s stream from one crisis

  To the next just around the bend

  You ask me to travel with You

  On this epic adventure to understanding me

  Us

  While this seems to you to be a harmless pursuit

  And something we can revisit on a regular basis

  Keep in mind the hidden damage to my heart and psyche

  As we paddle into a dark world

  Unreal to You

  All too real to me

  It is hard to blithely revisit a history never acknowledged

  Never cradled in the bosom of Our nation

  Never offered comfort

  Or care

  Or recognition

  Or rectification

  There are so many blind spots just outside Your peripheral vision

  It makes my spirit weep

  And my bones ache

  At the thought of the retelling of the story

  Perhaps I can be one of the pillars in repairing Your knowledge deficits

  But I must also protect myself in the process

  You will not

  You cannot see it

  Unless I tell you about it

  You cannot feel the pain

  Nor the weight of histories we carry

  Your history

  Unless I tell you about it

  You cannot stand in my place

  Or walk in my shoes

  We both know this

  But

  I will try my best to tell you about it

  Again

  Traffic Stop

  Traveling cross-country during the lockdown

  Beautiful landscapes

  Interrupted by a traffic stop

  Pulling out of the traffic

  My gut knows what this is about

  Although my white friend will take more time

  To process it

  She pulls to the right shoulder

  Once she is certain he is following us

  He walks up on my side

  The passenger-­side

  And looks in the window

  And tries not to stumble over his words

  Once he is aware that only the passenger is Black

  And not the driver

  Stuttering through

  “Well, you were following too closely”

  License and information about the rental requested

  She digs out her license

  I do not

  I hand him the paperwork for the RV

  He invites her back to his car

  So he can write out a warning

  Gregariously saying

  “No ticket this time

  Watch your spacing

  Keep it two to three seconds’ distance”

  She goes back to the car

  Stands on his driver-­side

  He chats her up

  About the cost of the van

  How he needs a vacation

  How she looks relaxed

  Writes out his bogus warning

  “10 miles under the speed limit

  All paperwork in order

  Following too closely”

  Three days later

  Yes, the time it took Christ to rise from the dead

  She has an “aha” moment

  An epiphany

  Replaying the event out loud

  Re­reading the warning

  She realizes the stop was not about her

  Or about doing anything wrong

  It was about what he thought he saw

  Through our windshield

  Black people

  On the road

  Spending money

  Being carefree

  But I know

  Even if she doesn’t

  That we are never free

  There is always someone

  Who thinks we are doing the things

  They should be able to do

  And by so doing,

  Deprive them

  Driving cars

  They should have

  Going to schools

  They should be in

  That we are living their best lives

  And feel obligated

  To terrorize us

  Out of having fun

  Remind us

  Hound us back to our proper position

  Send us back to their plantations

  To do their work for them

  Take back the things we have earned

  And own

  Returning everything to them

  Even though the
y are not entitled to it

  It is the existential and everlasting rut

  In which we all live

  As unending as the rivers of time and history

  And yes

  Unbowed

  We will endure it

  Knowing that

  Freedom

  Opportunity

  Exemption

  Will only ever touch a few of our lives at a time

  How You Hate to Rape Me

  Your actions and your leering gaze

  Where your friends cannot see you lustily looking my way

  Make a lie of every negative word you speak to or about me

  You call me nigger, whore, dog

  Yet you long to lay cradled inside me

  You long to take hold of flesh that was never yours to possess

  To poke and prod

  To seek love and finding none

  You seek to ravage, consume, annihilate

  Oh, to feel the smooth insides

  To touch the heart and heat of power

  That you can neither define nor imprison

  You with your clan of friends, holding me in place

  Demanding that I move for you as if you were an authentic lover

  You plunge your corrupted flesh into the secret spaces

  you allegedly despise

  Yet yearn to embrace

  You take me at gunpoint

  Painfully pressed against my skull

  Knives held against my neck

  Flashing your torchlight and badge in my face

  As justification and reminders (to yourself) of your corruptible power

  You spill the terror of your seed upon the ground and on me

  Seeking to water down what?

  My race

  My color

  My self

  Your craving for what I have

  What I am

  For what you can never be

  Diminishes you in the light of day and shows you have no true power

  Derogating my estimation of who and what you are

  I bear the shame in the public eye

  While you hide yours in the recesses of your perverted heart

  Who is the punk?

  The bitch?

  The beast?

  Who is the coward here?

  Because

  after all

  I am still here

  Living in the light of life

  While you continue to tuck your sins away in the alcoves of your spirit

  Knowing fully well that you are less than a man

  Less than human

  And although you may be able to periodically terrorize me

  Rape me

  Even kill me

  You can never own me.

  Tale of Two Georges

  Leaning over my body

  Whose name is George

  Learning my oath to hold all life sacred

  Except for that George that the policeman forgot was under his knee

  While he was conversating

  And protecting and serving

  Apologizing for the violations

  I must perform to learn

  The building blocks

  And substances

  That make us all human

  And not “other”

  As our society dictates

  Periodically asking for help

  So that I do not cut the wrong venous conduit

  prematurely

  Offering thanks for a life

  Lived on the shoulders

  Of those who have been cut down prematurely

  My lab partner leaves and I am elated

  To spend time communing with George unencumbered

  And exploring the gifts he has to offer me

  Shutting out the noise of the world

  And its violence

  I learn to listen

  In the silence

  Between the words

  Between the heartbeats

  For all that is unsaid

  I learn to hear the pleas of others

  When they do not know the lingo

  I learn to read their expressions

  See their almost-­hidden pain

  Interpret body language and movement

  To comprehend what the body seeks to teach me

  There in the silence

  In the cadaver lab

  I learn to translate and transmute all of these little “nothings”

  Into relief for others

  There in the silence

  I learn my job

  My profession

  My definition

  My job is to listen

  I listen

  If only that policeman had been taught to listen

  That other George

  Would still be alive

  America, Something Is Wrong

  America, something is wrong

  We are the exotic and perverse fruit that hangs from those

  Sweet, sweet Magnolia trees

  Reminding You of a home filled with love

  And reminding me of your malignant hate

  America, something is wrong

  We are the products of an American education system

  Schooled at underfunded dropout factories

  Struggling to touch a life perceived

  But still dangling just outside of our grasp

  And still living a hard and dichotomous life

  America, something is wrong

  We are the victims of Your deadly and quick judgments

  Judgments with neither the ring of justice nor mercy

  Only character assassinations

  We are the many generations left behind

  Widows and widowers who have lost their spouses

  Yet there is no name for a mother seeing her child lying dead in the street

  Although it happens with regularity

  And yet

  We remain bitter, bold, and only partially broken

  Living a bicameral existence

  Because we understand Your intentions for us

  Even if You will not speak them clearly

  America, something is wrong

  You are afraid

  Good so am I

  This is a fear you have

  Bred

  Engendered

  Cultivated

  Nurtured

  And now You cringe at the thought and sight of what You have finally birthed

  Painstakingly brought forth by the midwife of time

  A bastard child who hates You as much as You hate it

  An imperfect reproduction of You

  A lot less white

  Bearing Your family name

  A mongrel of Your shame

  The shame You try to hide away from the clear light of reality

  by using faulty history

  Born with a caul over its face

  Because it was never meant to breathe

  Shame at what You have conceived in the shadows of Your heart

  America, something is wrong

  We are the walking reminders of an assortment of sins

  The sins you now seek to turn into corpses at every opportunity

  America, something is wrong

  And until you can shake free from your own shackles of shame

  You bind us all together

  In a bizarre dance of rejection and reconciliation

  America, something is wrong

  Juneteenth

  From Lincoln to Granger

  To the enslaved, imprisoned, and powerless

&
nbsp; A two-year journey lost on the lips of a nation still embattled

  And now a holiday to be celebrated by all

  Freedom

  A single word of curse and blessing

  But the blessing was thwarted

  The delay of a government agent killed on the way with the good news

  or

  Withholding the news until the final slave-­driven cotton harvest can be brought in

  For profit

  What did this new freedom bring

  Slaves made free

  To do what

  Absolute equality of rights and rights of property between master and slave

  New relationships forged between employee and employer

  Free but not free

  Slave but not Freeman

  Now free in the country we do not know or understand

  Freedom that left broken families –­ broken

  Broken tongues and languages –­ lost

  A broken spirit

  A new status on paper

  Or not

  Of falsities that our lives would be the same

  A nation bathed in the idea that whiteness is superior

  That it is the final goal

  The ultimate state of being

  A new life without simple protections afforded most Americans

  We celebrate the end of human trafficking

  Except it wasn’t

  Making an unhealthy contract

  A perilous and corrupted deal with the devil

  Yielding futures that have remained little changed

  A new life coupled with complaints

  Complications

  Complicity

  Conflagrations

  Confusions

  Counterfeit protection

  Because someone must still be the lowest caste

  We see with clarity

  That the languorously moving march to freedom

  With laws that wholly protect all citizens

  Has brought about de-­evolution of the American spirit

  This involuntary arch

  Brings us into a new era

  But by our own choosing

  Also drags with it broken shards of past centuries of hate

  So that we can continue with the detrimental obsession that rightness is whiteness

  Two years and now two centuries later

  Our lives remain virtually unchanged

  The patrollers are dressed differently

  They have traded in their tattered rags for riot gear

  Swapped out their whips for tasers and bullets

  But our lives remain unhelpfully and unhealthily

  the same

  We Are Alike, You and I

  You and I are so alike