The Art of Becoming

The day the black man is made into a memory,
Is the day before a black child is made into a man.
Is the day after being black is made into injustice.
Or the same day a black woman is made into nothing at all.
The week after the black man is made into a memory,
The poetry slam becomes a vigil.
Each person taking turns holding the candle
Or the weapon
While others take turns throwing their hands in the air.
And we all become symbolism.
We talk about the death like a dinner conversation
Do not realize how we have become desensitized.
How we indulge on the images,
Pick at the social media meals
And then try to find value in their taste.
We do not realize how we are swallowing the death so easily
Until it is not in fact near us, but in us.
The news becomes something we’ve heard before.
The poem becomes something we’ve felt before.
The death becomes something we’ve been before.
It’s nothing new
The headline
The shot around the one minute mark.
The “look right there and you can see exactly where the bullet splits the body.”
And then nothing
Or the next thing
Or the next week after a black man is made into a memory.
And the Facebook feed is yet again a funeral procession.
With flower petals thrown in all the wrong places,
In someone’s hair perhaps.
As we lend our thumbs to the grieving family
Push them along
Give them our tears to soften the grave plot
Then make way for the next body
And it is all a cycle
Until the bullet makes its way to our home.
Until our faces are the ones masked in terror.
Until we become the haunting.
Until we become the ghost quietly pleading for someone to kneel in our honor.
Until we are the only thing we have left.

And even that is taken too.