Caught the news today to see another tragedy,
Another family’s grief at the hand of the police,
Another community’s fury because he was an unarmed teen,
Seems like a running theme if you ask me.
Black men are systematically targeted,
Automatically profiled as hardened thugs,
Startled by the lack of humanity seen in us.
Started to cry in anger, fallen tears for our fallen peers
whose deaths have made them famous.
Protesting injustice to a system who perceives our cries for help
as people making a fuss, and they wonder why towns burn up.
Enslaved initially, beaten, raped and maimed,
until our history is erased from our brains.
Placed into a state of inferiority, perpetually rendering us captive,
Active are the thoughts of our oppressors who transformed us into bastards,
Transformed the plantations into prisons,
Further diminishing the value of black men
until laughter follows the thought of them,
Until the world’s convinced that Egypt’s not in them,
they’ll methodically strip the power of knowledge
which is the key to our strength.
The war on drugs has morphed into the war on us. . . . . .
Tired of imprisoning us so the answer is killing us,
filling us with clips of shells while flipping the script on us.
Saying that our violent trends justify the lack of life that’s in them,
but upon first sight, their minds are made up about how this will end.
But they won’t win!
I will breathe for the ones before me, whose lost breath pave the way for me.
I will breathe, patiently waiting for our essence to return safely.
My breathing is breeding life that no man can take, no slave master can rape,
no KKK can hate, no judge can incarcerate, and no court can segregate,
Because the origin of my breath is love.
