One Day,
I won't choke back tears
and ask "Who the hell are you people supposed to be?",
muffling out my anger
like a muzzled dog.
Nah, I will muster fortitude,
not like grabbing for straws,
but like my life depended on it
and spit in your face
words that reduce me
to the space under your curled lips
or at the end of your nose,
anywhere you can't see anything more
than the labels you created.
I wish I could scream at you,
louder than the sirens
and more often than the security reminders
in Harris Teeter,
that kind of disregard
doesn't do shit for me;
it's more constipating than cheese.
See, "you people" ties my stomach in knots,
makes me writhe on the floor,
and hope I can puke,
but I can't;
my fingers don't go that far down my throat
and I consider myself a professional,
prayed to the porcelain god
so much
that all you hear is a flush
and my guts
go churning down the toilet.
"You people" sit in quiet cubicles
inhaling being ignored
like the stale air we breath
and share just to get
a piece of our humanity back.
I am not your most convenient representative
of all things black and negative;
my birth certificate has the same typed font
with letters that demand
even your crass government
call me by them.
I am not "you people".
I am the singular collection of this human experience
wrapped in my precious black frame
staring at you,
addressing you,
and you smear me out of
a continent's worth of history,
dress me in slavery,
and parade me around on
bloody soil?
Tell me again, "Who the hell are you people supposed to be?"
It, for dayum sure, ain't me.
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