Some Dessert

It happens every decade
somewhere people have had
enough.
Living in cockroach
rooms, enough welfare dimes,
enough stop and frisk,
enough heads kicked in, enough
wild drive-by bullets in the night,
crack fiends at the corner,
and never a cop when you need one
but always a cop whenever you happen to
be picking up that friday night dime bag
or out in the city with your girl for a
good time.
And if they're not there in person,
they're in your mind, lurking around,
the back alley where you parked your car
because parking is too expensive, or lurking
around the corner dope-man because
it is important to stop the sale of a plant
in today's inner-city neighborhoods.

They've had enough, so much that they
rip open at the seams and explosively vomit
the contents of their environmental programming
back onto their environment. This can come in
several ways: graffiti, spoken word poetry, film-making
or looting, drug addiction, returned violence, self-violence
and then a short period of justification and self pity
when one sees what one's done.

I feel like race relations have improved, and I think that
the term 'Race Relations' only serves to keep us separate.
I feel like I improved past racism because I had
every red-neck reason you could imagine to hate anything
that wasn't white, but when my friend said, ''I'm sorry, I have to hang out
with my black friends now.'' I didn't hate him, it made me sad.
I felt betrayed that I couldn't be what
those other friends could be, or have a friendship in the same way.
I watched them laughing, slapping hands and hugging, in a familiar
way that I couldn't have with my 'white' friends.

I've been alive to see the fiascos. I don't even need to name the
cultural icons, because you know them too, usually men dead at the
hands of policemen, or other men, sometimes black on black, sometimes
white on white, sometimes brown on brown. I think these designations
these colors, these words, these sets of symbols that produce a throat-noise
and single out one difference between any of us to limit and define the
way we see one another, is probably the worst set of bullshit ever
put on a plate that we had to sit and eat, in order to feel like we got
some desert.