Everything black in America begins with a cough
and ends as a sigh, creakingly and brief,
like death. Don’t tell me to cry no
more about my missing toes—hush—don’t sing
no love song now. You don’t and won’t
ever know how it feels to be nameless,
how to live for the cops, how it
feels to laugh without your heart, or how
to say all men are created equal while
your body’s full of holes like a graveyard,
how it feels to talk about our dreams
and the mountaintops we’ve climbed, how to deny
that hate has made his home here forever.
Ever heard about The Turner Diary, about Floyd,
Garner and the other illegal human beings bleached
out every day with choke holds and rifles
to make America white again? Last night I
I called my kids and asked them how
they think they’ll die—one said by cops,
the other a mob—it’s better to write
their epitaphs than all the I can’t breathe.
