I’m full of rage and this is not a help-me not a let’s-sit-down-and-discuss-this

not a why-don’t-we-hold-hands kind of rage this is dangerous yesterday,

I turned on the news at supper-time and ate the body of my father

while he was on his way somewhere else when a concerned citizen
stopped and started recording every significant part of me
is obliged in the consuming,

I’ve swallowed successive fathers and never developed a taste for patience

has long paid the passage dark as skin,

I died and was reborn this rage and a battle-cry middle child between slavery

and freedom if placelessness is a color,

I am a nation-state of grievances my arms are floorboards lined with corpses

my teeth are picket fences forty acre eyes and a heart
too heavy for any mouth to cradle,

I’m done with yourstory as canon ball-and-chain miss-

speaking mine in tongues tied up like boot laces,

I’m done with sideways glances lips-flapping dissonance as melody patronizing

my birth-right to live be think speak feel human,

I’m done bearing witness to our bodies red-lined into caskets ghettos prisons

smiles drawn quartered and fed back to my people in soup kitchens,

this rage is sick-and-tired an anger in defense of the dreams of families

who’ve deferred dying for generations,

this rage is riot ember in your cities flying banners to un-blind-fold seekers

shrouded in empty promises,

this rage is love revealing truth as power as people un-becoming the monsters

you’ve made clandestinely,

this rage is a howl-ing grief in all five stages and

you are not really running but

you should be because

this rage is the forgotten against forgetting and

you had to have known we were coming  but

I understand everything

you are but

you have no idea,

I’m saying this rage you are

precisely the point:
white city, not mine
but waiting in half-light,
but burning, promised, my crown
is a cross resting on its good
side, there’s this burning inside
like there’s never been and

I’ve never felt so alive, don’t touch me–

I’m on fire