For the Sonorous

If a gunshot sounds off

in the middle of a public street,

Will the world still hear it?

 

Recorded live, a studio audience

Set in place to cover every track of

the accidental state of emergency

 

Like a tree-- rolling, rumbling thunder

Under all the pain associated with not belonging

in the place where you were born.

 

We see it on the news every day.

Face to face,

trembling with our lives on the tightropes

 

We’d just been dangling from

Fifty years prior to

Any of us taking the royal tumble.

 

It was a dream-like state of some other world,

Where we radically

Envisioned our mortality on screens,

 

To eliminate the hot and heavy, familial mourning

That we hide so well

It wasn’t me.

 

Paranoia

Replacing faces and names with our own

just for it to feel so real

 

Like we actually cared about God or death--

Like they weren’t God and death--

Like we had a choice to live or die on our own.

 

Sometimes when the sky is blue I think about it.

When it’s night and blue turns to black

I think about it.

 

How close we actually get to the edge

Before we’re thrown back into our barracks

Just waiting, patiently

 

To be spilled like a glass of hot water

Strictly in the condition just to be

poured out.

 

Water trickling down their hands;

They love the smell

Of the heat as it hits the wind

 

But after a while, everything becomes so cold.

 

I’m too afraid to say the words I want to

in fear that this will be reduced to a poem like that

Thrown into a pile with the rest of them.

 

It’s so easy

for those of us who don’t know the

Feeling

 

But in my house,

the tv stays on with or without the remote control,

With or without reporters talking,

 

When it’s pitch black and we still hear sirens

Followed by gunshots,

Followed by a coverup,

 

We realized we can’t just turn it off.

 

Sometimes we get asked this question

Of which there is no answer,

Besides the pop of our eyes and a lower of our heads

 

A little shake, a tear,

A little mm or a ‘damn’

Of course we knew them.

 

We know the quick paced beat and the fight or flight

We know what our grandmama’s told us

the first time the police passed through the hood

 

We know fear.

We know that blackness and our attraction to fire

don’t discriminate through a gun

 

It don’t take no prisoners, just casualties.

 

With these three words--

Acidic and miniscule

less than

 

Not a matter of innocence or privilege,

But unaccountability--

this movement.

 

No, they were not my brother.

Or my sister, dad, a cousin, mother, friend,

A familiarity known not by name but blood,

 

These three words.

 

A connotation spat out as if it was

Difficult to swallow.

They lay it on dryly but thick like chalk.

 

We clean up the outline marks

from the bodies

in our neighborhoods

 

And they watch too,

but with popcorn

and lifted thin lips to an amused horror.

 

They clutch their bags.

We scream and yell,

March,

 

But when they leave, we go back

With new smiles;

maybe a nod.

 

We drop our heads.

We linger;

we last.