Art: “We bleed red, white, and blue” by aphrocentric_art

American Sonnet

I come from blocks where dead boys look like me,
they talk like me, broken quebrado, the thing
that breaks in our mouths, their words and ecstacy
wrung from our tongues, from our deaths they’re profiting

and fuck your iambs, I am ready to die
like Biggie, waiting for death unmerited,
inherited bullets and crack pipes and I
was born to drown in thoughts I cannot shed

I come from streets where boys like me are slain,
they slang pop rocks until their bones are sewn
into the earth, their blood bursting like rain
and falling like silence’s end, all scream no moan,
no rhymes to revive their soul, their bodies strewn,
tossed to the wind, no prayers or sins, just pain.