Black Birds

 

As she flicked the rubber against her wrist

her eyes linger into nature’s abyss

undressing the land with her eyes

imagining open fields and forests,

she sighs

 

Connecting the remnants of her scatterbrain,

to the agony of the wind's cries -

She watches birds flock against falling grey skies

 

There is one that always struggles behind

It’s wings flap in rhythm - identically, perfectly

A determined, naive, and very young mind

There flew a young bird that could never stay in line

 

She flicks the band against her wrist

 

Trees are claws, scratching the sky

Painting grey blurs of smoke and gas

Distorting into chaos amongst the mass

Then drifting in the way

of life's simplest tasks

 

It’s a map of death

The trick of the eye

She dreams of her last breath

while carving her thigh

 

Watching hazy red mountains rise

with the support of her veins

and with the support of the bird’s cries

 

She is same as any other being

Five pigments lighter

or five pigments darker

Five times brighter

or five times smarter

 

But if your level of melatonin

is too high

There should be no trace of weakness

Hidden within your eyes

 

We are those trees that cut the sky

They cut us, they cut us

They pass us by

They take us, steal from us

They like us, but not us

They love our flowers and not our branches

Love the oxygen, but hate our roots

They turn us to stumps

 

We rot and rot

Behind their television

Behind their phones

Through our stereotypes

Behind their screens

Turning us into creatures that are below human beings

 

Forget homo sapien

They think of us as simians

who steal, who shoot, and drug up the nation

who spread HIV and pulverize human creation

 

They leave our roots, then forget how this was made -

by cotton and marijuana built under the lashings of slave-trade

 

Traffic lights and mailboxes

Gas masks and security systems

Super soakers and laserphaco probes,

3D graphics and mobile refrigeration

So much, and never enough

 

She flicks the rubber band against her wrist

 

Even if it’s not enough

We all have broken hearts

just like them

Chemical imbalances

Melancholic life challenges

Just like them

 

We can’t control it

She can’t control it

When it rains, it rains

When the stump rots, it rots

 

Us humans differentiate visually, like beautiful terrains

But mother nature and illness all treat us the same

 

The color of our skin does not determine the strength of our mind

We can have depression just like the rest of humankind

There is no white thing and there is no black thing

So don’t look down upon your cousins for attending therapy for their broken wing

 

Abandon shame and stigma relating to mental illness within the black community and within the world.