RACE RAGE: In Honor Of People Like Trayvon Martin.

This is a poem written in conjunction with a fellow poet, Daniel Johnson about a few minutes ago. It basically is a vent against racism, and also possibly a homage to people of the darker skin hue who have suffered oppression through the hands of their fellow humans. (I am not naive of the fact that racism can also manifest itself by flipping the coin, but this poem is not about that!)

Here:

RACE RAGE

All hail the man who thinks he’s superior to another man

Who differs from him on the basis of a baseless categorization!

I’m talking the amount of melanin in his skin…

Long live his prejudice, which he wears as a crown,

The hate with which he’s shod his feet with 

Has for years enabled his kind to walk around

With an arrogant confidence…

And this night, he scans the vicinity, like a bird of prey

Waiting to capture his next prey, 

He walks to the side of the window

His flashlight blinding his prey’s vision,

If only he could point it towards his own chest

And let the light reveal the darkness in his own soul

I don’t know even really know how to begin to tell

Of how deadly this disease that eats with ease the core of what it means to be human is, because

Whatever I have to say will only scratch the surface, 

And this is skin deep; it goes deep and pierces even the bones

Pulled over half past midnight….
only probable cause is that my skin is close to the dead of night…..

checking my rearview and the lights blinding my sight…..

the officer approaches and orders me out of my car, says he needs to search…

standing on the side of the road and my pride is hurt…..

thirty minutes goes by, forty five minutes goes by…..no words..

he’s now rummaging through my trunk and pulls out a baggy…..now he knows he has me….

planted evidence without my fingerprints is enough to get me cuffed and sent..

of justice there isn’t a scent…

riding in the back handcuffed wondering how I’m going to get out of this mess…

even though I know I’m blessed it feels forsaken…

all I can do now is start waiting…..

meanwhile there’s a problem festering and it’s frustrating

that here it is in 2012 and we still have to deal with the ills of man’s heart..

his heart so callous and cold that he doesn’t mind

blatantly discriminating because he thinks I am a criminal…

that in the deep dark subliminal

recess of his mind he really believes my skin marks me guilty….

when it’s our souls that make it so…

and his is just so deep down dark that it’s hard to tell how his life starts….

you see this problem he has is an issue with sin…

and until he fixes it it is going to eat at him…

gnaw him down to his bones
and it’s a silent killer because he’s rationalized it all in his mind…

since he’s learned it since birth both literally and subliminally through message of the culture

he still hasn’t realized that sin is the real culprit…

not those of darker skins than him…..yet he attaches the guilt of sin to them

and thereby thrashes deeper into the clutches of sin’s deadly embrace…..

sin is all in his face…..

but it’s in the mirror of his soul….

the same one it pains him to behold….

so the only place he lets it show…..is out on patrol on a dark road…..

how ironic that the road he walks is also dimly lit…

but he’s happy to take small doses of poison until his last kills him……

(C) 2012 - Ayokunle Falomo, Daniel Johnson.