Bleeding Heart/Just What Happens

Catastrophe: An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things. 

As in when watching the series dahmer on netflix I kept hitting Pause. 

play. Pause. Pause. Pause. 

Hiccuping my breath to slur out the inevitable, 

as if to save these brown boys from becoming exactly as they ended up, 

dark meat in a white mouth, bones with which to pick his teeth. 

Not even a park, not even a flower

As in the way their families renounce their trauma packed clumsily 

into a film reel, loaded, laid out without so much as a warning. 

How their children’s hearts were jerked out of their chests 

/Off guard / And none of this is a metaphor. Just what happens 

I wonder what catastrophe would have to unleash 

itself to deworm our leaky ears 

The babes spoke and have been devoured 

And 3 decades later white men are still flushing acid on brown 

bodies in Milwaukee. And white girls on twitter complain 

that the story isn’t gory enough. And none of this is a metaphor. 

Just what happens

Next halloween I think I’ll go as myself 

because there’s never been a time the world wasn’t scared 

of a black body. Only what it can do, never what is done to it 

/On guard/ A classic

This is what it means to be lonely 

- to be delivered into the hands of your destroyer in accordance with the law. 

To holler in a room stacked with people and still hear the echo. 

Which is to say this is not the first time a white man has swallowed 

a brown body without remorse. Which is to say the very nature 

of this country has been preparing him for this moment 

I don’t even know if this is a poem, say a manifesto instead, 

I’m calling for death to the bleeding heart.

And on the last day, part of me hopes the sky will writhe with grief

And break open green in torment 

And on the last day part of me hopes 

that my God is a god of vengeance.