I turn on the Blacklight,

And look under America’s skin,

Peeling away layers,

Exposed is her skin disease,

Her obsession with race,

Her legacy of Slavery and Segregation –

Those peculiar institutions!

            The auction block, like a butcher’s block….

The signs of the Color Line.

Approaching the Blacklight,

In the twilight years of my life,

I journey back in time,

To backroads taken, and not,
To look at life through worldly black eyes,

Through the lens of a pandemic,

Yet always through the eyes

Of a Black Boy

Whose Soul is on Ice

A Native Son

Living “Sonny’s Blues”

A Black Man Who Cried I Am

A Manchild in the Promised Land

Who Came Down These Mean Streets

Battle Scarred but not broken

            My Black Life has always mattered!

It was the dawning of Aquarius,

The Psychedelic Sixties,

Of Hippies, Yippies, and Woodstock,

Of free love and peace,

Of music, story, and song –

The songs my People sing.

Sing a song…

Painfully spiritual,

Heartrendingly soulful,

Elegiac and ecstatic,

Up-tempo and uplifting

Raunchy and revolutionary.

Subversive as a drumbeat,

The drumbeat heard at Creation.

The staccato rhythm of a tongue

Twisting itself to tell a story

Through a foreign tongue,

A twisted tongue

That speaks of Truth while lying.

A tongue that cannot

Encompass spiritual pain

Or tortured triumph.

            The gift of story and song.

It was the dawning of

            the Decisive Decade,

A decade of Death and Destruction,

Of chickens coming home to roost,

Of the ascendancy of the New Order of Assassins.

Die Nigger Die!

The Blacklight of my Life

Sines on Death and Destruction,

Of a sniper who kills our King.

Of the Prince who had been assassinated,

Of Camelot revealed as Myth,

Of the Conflagration of the Great Society.

            “Burn, baby, burn!”

The fire next time is always present.

The smoldering embers of Slavery and Segregation,

Easily lit and rekindled on the bonfire of hate.

            “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

Self-evident lies are thrown on the bonfire of hate,

Going up in smoke,

The mythical American Dream.
Going up in smoke,

Laid bare as a Nightmare.

            “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream….”

At night

What nightmares awaken me.

The rise of the South,

The spirits of the Confederate dead rising.

Old Confederate soldiers never die, never die, never die

Old Confederate soldiers never die, never die, never die

The Confederate States of America

Never admitted defeat.

Black Blood still soaks the land,

Fertilizing the soil with Black Blood.

This land that is mine

Perhaps even more than yours (white America)

Since the gift of sweat and brawn

Cultivated American prosperity.

            “This land is my land….”

The Black Wall Street burnt down,

A counterpoint to theories of Black inferiority

            “Burn, baby, burn!”

The smell of Black flesh,

Of Black bodies burning

On the bonfire of hate,

Waft through America’s history,

Permeating the social fabric.

            “Burn, baby, burn!”

As I turn the Blacklight off,

The ghastly scenes of burning Black flesh

Waft through America’s history,

And the collective unconscious of my People.

The ghastly scenes

Of strange fruit swinging from red maple trees,

That American dance of Black death,

The metronome of Black Death.

Die Nigger Die!

Die Nigger Die!

But I live,

Because someone must tell this story,

Of Black Blood, The Black Blood of Poetry.

            Because Black Lives have always mattered!