White Mississippi Lynching of the Freedom Summer: 1964-2010

White Mississippi Lynching of the Freedom Summer:
1964-2010

“You sir, are a racist!”
They said.
When they looked me in
the eye and were
afraid.

“You are the one
with a problem.”
They said.
As they told me that they
were the ones with the money
and the guns
and the words
and the knifes
and the handcuffs
and the tanks
and the nukes
and the whips
and the chains
and the skin.

They said I am the one with the problem
as they locked my
handcuffs in place;
speckling red drips
on white forearms
like red crosses
on white hoods.

Their eyes are all
I can see through my puffy
swollen face, laying
on the side of the road,
being dragged into the
woods, while my
tongue is cut
out and while my own
likeness ceases to search for me.

While my own likeness
continues to torture my
body, my flesh:
c / u /t, my entrails springing

out like the
alarm clock
I tried to be:
broken.

There are few like
me in this world
and fewer still
like me in its history.

The whistle blower
holds the same letters as
my alleged skin color,
but if I point
it out, I can be martyr for no one
but I can be killed.

Historically speaking,
I will actually be silenced.

Historically speaking.
I will actually be silenced
by the very category of people
I see in the mirror.
The very category of people
who say, “You sir, are a racist.”

Well then, I must walk this
chalk-drawn-line
on tiptoes.
For the white dust that marks
the world’s walk
is dotted with drops of blood!

The same as the ones on my forearms
and the same that
have stained my shoes.
And the same that have stained
their white hoods.

I sir, am a racist.
I must let them know
that they are right.
For I am not white.

I am pink.
I am the blood of oppression
that has been worn in my coat jacket
past down from my father and his father before.
I am that blood stained red that
is all that’s left of it’s white leather beginning,
that my father can barely see and that his
father can’t see at all.

I am the permeation of that stain through that jacket
into my skin, and into my own blood.
It courses through my blue veins of empathy
into my purple heart of love and becomes my own red blood.

I am forever changed of color,
“white” skin stained pink.
The same red blood runs in me now that
has always been spilled.
Perhaps if the red of human blood
was the only,
the only color everyone cared about
then maybe it wouldn’t matter that I’m pink.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter what color anyone was.

Knuckles

Knuckles.

I.

I guess I laid my backhand
down on the sunspot burner;
boiling- red – communist:

Giving and taking equally,
as its warmth to bone-shank soup
allows growth—its warmth to
flesh though, chars and scalps,
my knuckles raw: cracked cobblestone,
black and peeling top layers.

II.
Prayers for third degree
burns need not fly to the other
side of my palms. They should drip into
the rivers run with pollution, brackish and
swimming with silt. Like my lungs, post pack consumption.

There the water prayers, liquid humanity,
will be filtered and cleaned and will leap
from little home taps, faucets, and sinks:
rustic brown-red metals, shiny silvers, cold
and gray pipette giraffes, children’s toys
largely ignored until: burn.

III.
The flesh singed, epidermal ruptures occur:
blisterous mountain tops popped with the
abandon of boredom and dissatisfaction.
Infection holed up under finger nails are
Toe jam hermits, vagrants, bumming smokes
under freeways, not speaking- for the cars on
the overpass speak for them--
they say nothing.
They stay there until there is no
room left for them.
They get reckless, and pull apart that ground
leaving pink tender craters outlined in translucent
vulnerable flaps of flesh, infected unless:

IV.
Those prayers made it into the water.
Cool, soothing H two prayers.

I can leave the scarred arms and singed bricks the
vagrants pulled up from my cobblestone
walk. I simply need to turn on the water.
Other humans will run over my hot red skin,
little circles of shame, they will
soothe
my

Burn.

The L Train

The L Train

Your slanted azure (sk)eyes;
with their brown splinters-
that cloud the black pupil, they
caught mine on that ride.

They held memories in
place; like that blue house
with the magenta ivy side,
which sat on the corner plot,
next to your house on our street.

The simple street we
ran when we were foot-racing,
when the wind felt like paint
brushes, bristling dry red
blush left in lines marking our
bodies:

Warriors of innocence.
Warriors of a grace conflicted.
Like bleeding red cuts for the sake of
never bleeding at all.

We would touch the brown
wood door, who still bore the
image of the oak tree it came from
within our own minds, then we
would sprint head-first

Back! To your lawn panting,
gasping for breath. Our lungs
clawed for consensus with
our brick-hued heart.

We looked to circulate
the blood they pump, the
same blood that courses now
on these tracks. Though, it
travels now in larger veins.

Of course, those weren’t your
(sk)eyes. Of course, they’ve never
seen the course we ran those days.
Of course though, only you and I
had ever seen the azure skies
and brown splinter clouds that
marked the course boundaries of our
racetrack all along.

Cincinnati or: The place I had a home

Cincinnati or: The place I had a home.

Careening down the highway,
275 loop eastbound past the Kenwood rd. exit.
I pause
and light a cigarette.

There is no longer solace on this
slick black sober road or in the
pond shallows I pass that sit awestruck
like the men who saw the suicide, silent and static:
in front of my red brick and green-blue
bottle glass highschool I see fleeting.

The tall white oak decaying in the
middle of its front entrance stands a
pillar of what education?
I “learned” by sitting in beige desks
with the chair still attached like shackles
cutting into my spine rather than my wrists.

I never bled, but each day left the tan hallways
over the mismatched green and white tiles
through the dried yellow fields into my grey
car, rolling to Cornell road. Until I get back
to Lake Isabella, the place I would fish

when my father was still waking at
4:30 and was still walking into
my room.

The lake passed, I’m back to the yellow farmhouse
The one that’s stood since the civil war, the one
where Morgan’s raiders slept peacefully
in their burlap pop tents waiting.
The one that has a new neighbor
designed by the coats and sold to the
yuppies who just want their children
to attend my red brick and green-blue bottle glass highschool.

“Buy them a bicycle” I say as I flick my cigarette
in their yard- I learned more on Twightwee rd. past the Arby’s
by 84 lumber the time I realized the folded leather
that held me inside was lost, and the
six-pack I had in my hand was running out.

You can’t bike back up Loveland Maderia. You just
can’t fit between the corvettes and cadillacs. You have to
get back to the bike path with the fresh asphalt.
The one that takes you all the way to Morrow past the old
ammunition factory where my grandparents live. You
have to take it back to the Pony Keg where they sell
to underage children.

You can ride back down Loveland Maderia sure,
but only through the Walgreen’s lot and past the
Speedways that were Marathons.
Then you walk next to the 275 loop back to
bike trail and past Lake Isabella, where my
father took me to fill the air in my bike tires
the air pump neatly stationed out of place
by the boat rental. Just like a sun cap in the
moon’s souvenir shop.

He should never have put any air in those
tires. Then I’d never had lost myself
and now coming down the 275 loop
wouldn’t feel so much like returning to my coffin:
mahogany, vinyl, and cold.

Train

Train

I am confined to the cold
rusting steel and splintered
wooden slats. Only moving from
point: a. to
point: b.
There is no freedom, never was.

I was created to be obsolete.
They made me to work and
then made the little metal play things.
Rouge breasted coupes with
belts for stopping the passengers.
Little metal play things to turn at
stop lights or stop
. On a dime
when I cause the salt and peppered striped
dividers to fall like the sides of their
drivers lips, and the skin in between their brows
falls too, and sweats like my steam, theirs
in anger, mine in exhaustion.

Am I really that awful?
That my back breaking freight
isn’t enough for the precious
minutes ticking away like tellers’
fingers counting stacks of money:
chugging along, regular, like me.

Sometimes, the coal black that my
back holds is not equal to the red of my
engine coal they throw in me with
no mercy. My heart it burns glowing orange
and red haze, for as long as they
deem I must move.
My spinal columns connected by
little iron loop bones connecting car to car,
the weight pulls the cool metal taut for as long as
they deem I hold it.

Their favorite fuel
is my burden and I have no choice to
place it on my shoulders, armless to steady.

Surely those beings who made me can see
that sometimes Atlas needs encouragement
and would love a break from his eternal weight.
I wish, I were Atlas. At last then, the
weight I hold would be for everything,
and not for the slanted angry eyes
who’s blues and browns never
sparkle in their disgust at their wait,
in their shoveling for my heart,
in their contempt for my obsolescence.

Alas, though, I am no Atlas.
I just bear my freight and plug
along. No one knows that each
whistle’s a wail of hope
to get off these tracks. And the steam
the closest to tears that my life
will ne’er see that day.