I stood standing in front of the bathroom mirror at the age of 7 Hoping to open my eyes wide enough to look more like the pairs of my parents’ Appearances never changed But always tried to rearrange Whitewash the thoughts of the guilt of a concept I could never frame So I tacked i up on the backwall of my closet Pretending that I lost it amidst stockpiled piles of misplaced anger That played the ammunition for family arguments I took my fear and swallowed it Rested all my hate on my tongue and cocked it Let the frustration fester Till it fractured my speech’s once fluid notes Making the world feel slightly sloped Everything backslid Towards my self-centered core Identity crisis was my idol Call it Isis I thought it gave me license To set myself apart from the world Instead It stood upright a dagger dance a whetstone pirouette carving out a resting place in my mind I was just a goatskin bled dry of it’s bitter wine A handless clock told by the dark how to keep time
This is for every child that sits behind a history book that wasn’t written for them So they cover up their pain with artistry The edges where the text stopped and crayon canvases begin Framing the crossing of the Delaware and the great Sphinx the wax bleeding into history blotting out George Washington's features into a color wheel with no beginning and no end For no forefathers face had ever looked like any they have ever known I don’t think I’ve ever written more honest words than this That to not speak of race is to kill a culture And we as a society are internally hemorrhaging
Come let us sit at the right hand of truth and beside the left hand of spirit A Deathless scale that portions us as an unbroken horizon against the Son We are meant to stride frictionless Like the bits of kaleidoscope glass we are We are more than the sweeping commotion within our earthly sight That covers our eyes like a stone fog We are subtly and wind Seized by different dusted vessels of infinite water and conducting light
How can one measure the worth of a garment when we are the threads? We only see the edge of the loom of which we are attached But too many see a thread of a different color as coming from a bolt of different cloth
24 years spotless of anger 19 years of wringing hands Now I’ve set the table We’ll have our fill before the end