I Need You TO KNow
Poems
post #1
a couple of poems that I've written that resonate with me right now.
Lights: A Film
Lights
I created a film to go with this poem a while back, so if you 'd like to you could watch that!
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I am painfully aware of how alive I am… or am not. I am painfully aware of things ending & beginning. I am painfully aware of tiptoeing down the hall at night. There is no hall. There is no night. Those back roads are the hall. The highway is the hall. Life is the hall. I am still tiptoeing.
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I haven't gotten to the point yet. I’m sorry. There's no way to do this easily. It’s too easy. I’m sorry.
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Everything is red & blue now. No matter where or when, everything could be danger. Or more like, no matter where, I could be danger. Everything is red or blue or both. I swear this will make sense. I swear.
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Here. Maybe this will make it easier to understand: almost every day, I see blue and red lights flashing in my rearview mirror even when there are none. It started after I was pulled over, and now, I am afraid of the odds. 1/1. ½. ¼ people killed by them last year were my shade of other, and I might be on ¼ borrowed time.
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It’s not like I see ghosts. I see spirits. One red car and a flash of high beam brings a nightmare that will never jolt me awake. One blue car slowing to a stop morphs itself into possible wrongness. Into possible crime.
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I don’t have to commit one. I don’t have to commit a crime to be gone. We don’t have to commit a crime to be gone. And everytime I think they’re coming, I start to disappear in the mirror.
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I haven’t yet gotten good at playing off death like a game. I haven’t yet found a way to not change everything about me in order to seem ordinary or not ordinary for my color or just normal. I haven’t yet found a way not to be afraid of myself or my skin. I haven't yet found a way to stop being this shaking thing so people could stop worrying or not worrying about me.
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I confess: I am not afraid of the lights. Or the cars. I am afraid of what lies within them. I’m afraid of their fear. I’m afraid I’ve already committed the crime. Or that it doesn't matter. I’m afraid that I sound crazy. That I am crazy. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of so much more than this, but all I remember from that night is bright flashes of blue and red.
Dear Reader
all of my poems are explanations now.
they used to be a leaf,
falling like my
heart,
the ocean, swelling with pain, then disappearing,
evaporating into only a desert of anger.
now every poem is a lonely discussion—
every poem is:
see? here is the proof. here is the evidence that I am flesh and blood, here it is, alive in ink: that my life matters just as much as yours. see? this is what happened when I got pulled over. this is how my heart felt in my chest, this is how I didn’t cry even though I wanted to so bad. see? this is how many of us are dying. this is how many of us still don’t matter to them. see? this poem, this poem right here is enough to tell you that too many people are complicit. too many are just bystanders. and you might be one of them.
see??
reader—
if you’re still reading—
we have work to do.
On our camping field trips, they’d say,
“Whoever is lightest when we leave wins.”
Sunscreen was a must for us kids.
We, the black ones, laughed because we thought it was funny: we’d always lose, of course.
But that was the thing we didn’t understand— we’d always lose, of course.
We didn’t realize that the joke was on us.
They’d say oops, our mistake, laugh uncomfortably at their omission of the brown thing but,
mostly, they’d be relieved that we didn’t get the joke.
I get it now I think.
I don’t burn but
bullets sear through my flesh every day.
I don’t burn but I did.
In a tree,
on a stake,
always.
I don’t burn but
maybe one day I will hope to.
That is, to me,
the worst kind of lynching— wishing I was already dead.