What will I teach my kids
About the man in blue?
Will I tell them to fear for their life?
Like the child I was, used to do?
Will I warn them to hide under the bed
When cops come to the door?
Will I put their hands behind their head
and drop them to the floor?
Will I say, “Son take off your hoodie
When your rights are being read?”
Will my girls grow up, half of them privileged?
The other doomed for dead?
A broken system with quotas to obtain.
Tell me how it can change.
We’re all a number in a lottery of shame.
Just a new face with the same tainted name.
Grandpa killed two men, broad daylight.
Pops stabbed in the heart times two.
These men knew how to put up a fight.
I too, remember fleeing the men in blue.
His angry stick swung again and again.
Blood spray painted the streets
Pops laid out with a crooked grin.
Cops and robbers was not a game to me.
Explain privilege to a child
With her dad’s blood on her face.
Is it something I can turn back in?
I’d love to just have a safe space.
My eyes burning from the mase.
I should have known at 8 to stand down
Front page of the news.
Laughing stock of the town.
So what will I tell my kids?
Should I pretend my trauma wasn’t real?
Do I prepare them for the worst?
What age should they learn Emmet Till?
What about Freddie Gray?
My son has the same last name.
Would they treat him this vile way?
These are the thoughts inside my brain.
My girls living in a world,
Where curls won’t hold a perfect strand.
Beautiful and bright can’t save them
From a possible fate like Sandra Bland.
I’ve been cuffed up a few times.
Ceiling stars and silver bars to the sky.
I’ve had coffee with caring cops.
And sued the devil from groping my thigh.
My poems mimic sidewalk dreams
that echo through different wavelengths.
Don’t tell me we’re not on the same team.
I vibrate higher than average see.
My blended babies
Don’t fit technicolor types.
We will teach them against classism
And steer clear from black magic and wicked white.
Black America being shot at.
People feeling guilt from being White.
How do we stand in solidarity?
When we let hatred fuel this fight.
Good and bad in all things.
Whether Black, Tan, White or Blue…
This world has no answer for us.
So LOVE must be our only point of view.
* Rest In Peace George Floyd and the many others who have been victimized by hate crimes and police brutality. 🙏
