It must be in the fucking water
Being force-fed to the police, the prosecutor
And the politicians who care nothing for Black bodies
Falling like leaves in late August
In Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island
Only minutes away from where my own child sits
Watching "The Muppets Take Over Manhattan"
I am aching complicit
indulgently nursing an October heartbreak
While the world crumbles insensible
inexplicable in November
It is now Decеmber and the world has lost its fucking mind
Christmas trees being еrected like dicks
Amidst the groundswell of Bil Cosby accusers
Coming out of the closet of secrecy
Synchronizing with stories about
frat boys growing up rapists
All this as the national justice system wraps up cases
In pretty colored presentations to grand juries
Who collectively refuse to indict
murderers captured on video
Freed by unpopular opinions
that trump the overwhelming evidence
Available to anyone with a cellular phone
I am holding my own sorrow back from my own child
Born Black in a country in
which her brown body does not matter
To anyone with any power
I am watching these videos over and over again
The helpless bile rising angry in my chest
I am not feeling forgiving
It is time for these oppressors to turn
their fucking cheek to the public victims
All these accounts of these killings reek of racism
These events mount a war against the poor
This is not a fucking video game
These men who are killed are not dominoes
These dead boys belonged to people who now mourn
them without closure, without a day in court
We are moving backward through history
Foolish as it might've been
we the people had swallowed the fallacy
that trumpeted the end of a time
When Black mothers who lost children to white arrogance
had no recourse yhat shameful time
that supposedly ended when Emmett Till, when Herbert Lee
when Medgar Evers when Harriette Moore, when Malcolm X
Back then, there was no hypocrisy about the system
being stacked against anyone with a smidgen
of melanin staining the history of their skin
Fifty years later we must continue to raise
our resources to protest the blatant lies
littering Black people's experiences with the law
We are not protected by it
This is not what we voted for when we
voted for our first Black president
This is not what freedom fighters hoped for
when they marched against segregation in Selma, in Chicago
This is not the dream Dr
Martin Luther King spoke about in Washington, D. C
Almost a decade and a half into the 21st century
Race relations in America is still
a fucking cauldron bubbling angry
Under the ugly swirl of Black despair
and a lack of white accountability
Parading as a penal system
in which forty percent of those incarcerated
Come from a group which only consists
of 12 of the entire fucking population
With numbers like that
what good does it do me to comply with those in uniform?
I am shot at 12 years old for waving a
toy gun you sell to me every Christmas
Wrestled to the ground for breaking up a fight because
You suspect me of selling loose cigarettes
Put in an illegal chokehold because I dare to ask why
The whole incident filmed for my family to
watch my death played out on primetime TV
the public angle assuaged by the assumption
that justice has to eventually come
My death must mean something more than
a footnote in media frenzy of our time
I am owed something for having been
violated by a system sworn to protect me
My name is Trayvon Martin
My name is Tamir Rice
My daughter is Michael Brown
Your mother is Sean Bell
Your father Yvette Smith
Eleanor Bumpus could have been any one of us
I am Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner is all of us
This phenomenon is an invisible epidemic
where the victims are forever silenced
by state-sanctioned executions
We have to find the courage to speak for them
We must find the voice of resistance for ourselves
For our children, for our children's children
It is time to raise more than our eyebrows in protest
It is time to put our bodies where our hopes lie
This is not a moment to invoke the sweet by and by
Now is a moment for action
If there's any humanity left in you get up, stand up
Join a fucking protest, pick up a fucking pen
Write, scream, wail, march, meet, gather
Plan, strategize
it is time to find a way to make them listen
It is time to make the powers that be hear
They need to see we are no longer complicit
It's time to raise the roof on these motherfuckers
It is time, it is time we raise
the roof on these motherfuckers
So they know we are never, ever going away