Brutality in 3 Parts
Locations
Twelve criminals get around a table
Da Vinci paints them
We call it the last supper
Twelve black men get together
They sit & eat
Police tell them to keep it moving
Is nothing holy when we feast?
I guess our grace ain’t cutting it
//
Some of you pretend you care,
But you don't
Activist on the outside
Indifferent on the inside
'Cause you got God, right?
The lord is your shepherd
So, you shall not want,
For anything, right?
You don't even mourn the death no more
Just try to fit in at the funeral
You'll just mourn the poet
Mourn the messenger
Conceptualize your outcry
'til there's no reason to cry at all
Look... there it is
Then, you're over it
Like dead bodies
don't move you no more
It takes art
Don't embrace reality no more?
What you thinking about, then?
You just thankful for life,
When you pray, right?
'Cause you ain't mothered death
Palms together
Looking like shaking mortality
You not thinking about nothing
But gratification and making it back home
Scared of inevitability
Yall just as scared
Just as scared as the killers
Killers that aren't Black
Killers who see me and see an animal
So, killers just kill us
But, ain’t human just another animal?
Born with no venom
So, we turn to weapons
Quick as cobras
But, yall just ammunition
Working with the machine,
Without even knowing
Like no empathy
Only civilized
when it comes to letting go
Like them guns
That took our sons...
//
When you kill a black boy
You are freeing another spirit
To interrupt the racism in a bullet
Make all this black more dense
Like an impenetrable cloak of ancestors.
So, don't fear lightly
Fear with precaution.
This africanity the greatest privilege.
To know that they aren't looking down,
But, are walking with you
Is to know we may lose this battle,
But, hate will never win the war.
Because no weapon formed
against us shall prosper.
Like, "don't shoot,"
my hands are up
Like rope ladders fell from the heavens
Like "no... at least send ashes to Africa,
So I can die in my mother's arms
Before my eyes roll over the concrete"
Like I got up off my knees
And started praying with my feet
When the cop told me "up..."
Like the mighty race I am
Like the trigger squeezed
But, the gun jammed
and it was a mysterious way
Like my walk home nearly every day
Like can I get a witness
On this block tonight?
Like I was still a son
Because I am
Like Mike Brown still walks, with us,
Because he does
Like Life and miracles
Weren't mutually exclusive
And neither had to be considered miracle
Like God is a Good God
Like we're still overcoming
Like an unending negro spiritual
And if there is a heaven
I've already seen those pearly gates
They resides in the mouths
of those that speak justice
And my story
And their own lives
For then, we live eternally
Like the weapon never prospered
Like emancipated souls
Black souls
Impenetrable black
Fear with precaution