What Did You Expect?
No more justice and other made-up words
I’m done writing about
the inherited injustices
in our — no, your — America.
You go do it if you feel
so strongly about it.
I prefer meditating
on lower stake affairs, like
the love who fled her heart and
the heart I left behind;
the one who left and the one who stayed,
those who don’t feel deserving
of love and those who accept it,
however precious, however flawed.
All the cruel global inequities?
I won’t speak of them again.
At least not in the same manner.
If I do, I won’t be speaking as
a prisoner of my own despair,
but as a detached amorally-
displaced poetic sociopath.
That’s me wanting to fit in.
That’s me coping with what can
never be changed in my lifespan.
It’s all been said.
All been done.
I’m done with it.
But all I ask is this;
if you find yourself outraged
by the Breonna Taylor verdict
— or lack thereof — what could you
have possibly expected?
Justice? Is that but an abstraction
twisted upon the mercurial whims
of men owning the most stuff we all
agreed to believe is essential?
And yes, not all men, right?
What can anyone ever hope
to gain from protesting a system
that has slavery baked onto
its very Constitution
and by all intended purposes,
is humming along like a well-oiled
cotton gin grinding the disenfranchised
snuffed voices of black and brown bodies
back into oblivion
without missing a beat?
How can we challenge a system that works,
that has always worked for some,
but was never designed to function
for us all in the first place?
Is not fighting a perfectly unjust,
perfectly functional system
a lot like fighting a house fire
by rearranging the furniture?
And if this flaming house divided
against itself but never designed
to shelter all of us should fall,
would the remaining voices unite
to build a better, more inclusive home
on the empty lot’s smoldering embers?
If that’s what it takes,
will you be a firefighter
or a fire-starter?
I don’t have any answers,
and my firefighting days are long past.
I’ll just sit here silently watching
as it all burns down around me
waiting for what comes of the ashes.
But my heart won’t compel me
to say or write another verse
about justice with a capital J
because I’m sick and tired
of being sick and tired.
I will sit here writing about love
until it’s my turn; till they come for me
or until I run out of things to say.
