The cracks won’t hold
they’re leaking
viscous rivulets of lives bled out by
hate.
Rushing downstream, they seem to percolate
quicker, now
what does it take?
Would those posed behind the upstream
perpetrators
clinging to their cold metal supremacies
those authoritative barrels
that represent their idea of America
hollow, industrial, automatic
would they so readily defend
their idea of what it means to be
\a US citizen
if it hadn’t been.
fifty people in Orlando, dancing at a gay club
nine black members of a congregation
dozens of students
three individuals exercising their belief in choice
six worshipers at a Sikh temple
three-hundred people at Wounded Knee
black men fallen by the hundreds in the streets,
folded into the bloody fabric uniforms of a racist
police state
their idea of America is just to take, to take, to take
land, space, resources, lives
so long as they can keep exercising their right
to represent
their upstream dreams
they dream up our
nightmares.
and my heart hurts
beating on like so many others
beneath a pillow of grief
incomparably so
to the weight that rests
on the chests of many
that have lost so much
felt the lives of their lovers
their children, parents, sisters and brothers
be swept away.
I think of my heart, suffocating in every beat
and I think they must feel that weight
as heavy, immovable as a mountain range
although those they loved were removed
as if they were as fluid
as a drop of water
as if they were as light
as a time-worn feather
as if they were worth less than the price
of the right to carry.
They
those with their upstream priorities
They won’t ever taste the exponentially rising
parts-per-million
of copper and heartbreak
they send rushing down
down
down
no they won’t ever taste
But take a closer look
at their carefully constructed
dam
manifested fear in concrete
it will burst
riddled with bullet holes
gaping absences of all the souls
taken in the name of what those few white men
think it means
what does it mean
to be American.
