Every day you wake up to write
A brand new poem about white people,
How our problem is: we are white
But seem oblivious to that fact.
You call it the privilege of whiteness,
An easy assessment to make
When we’ve become, in your eyes, less than human.
When we’ve become, in your eyes, less than human.
I must become abstract for a rage so pure
It burns without need of a fuel.
You say you hate me. How can I reply
When whatever hatred I possess
Isn’t spread out like yours across
The Sunday supplements? My voice,
In fact, has been silenced by the mob,
And goes quiet when you decide to be free
With the truth and the motives of others.
There aren’t enough martyrs in your mirror
I guess, but there’s no sense in putting my face there
When it’s only the idea
of yourself you despise,
The idea, you say, of America, that burns so strong
You can’t wait to set fire to the next belligerent
— Even the pretense of a trial is obscene.
But the fake Confederate flag you wave
And the KKK wannabe's you want to place in charge
Can’t save you now, for
We can hear the Mockingbird talking points
At 4 am from the Adrenochrome dens
Noosed up for you in a bow,
Have films of those you follow
Sawing off the face of a conscious child,
And know their plans for the mass extinction
Already so far along you can see it in the sky.
And we grieve how they've enslaved your mind,
Chattel for so long, a slavery you urge
To make perpetual, as natural as death
You say, or war, or division, a game to play
When there’s nothing at stake but the zero
Sum gain of the power we crave over others,
What you call justice, of which, thankfully,
There is none here, only the opportunity
For healing. Like you, for example,
May have once strung up Negroes on trees,
As I might once have felt blessed
To have taken my master’s seed.
The life that it left for us is our lives today,
Glaring with fortuna’s cards across the table.
To eat your anger would be to destroy
My own. To embrace your suffering
Would mean I must forgive my own.
Here’s some black coffee in a china white cup.
Write another poem.
