Self-appointed and self-anointed wayward wanderer of backwater environs

Amidst a misanthropic peoples—so assumed—with minds in irons



You’ve been endowed, nay, privileged to say, since the inception of this artifice

“I’ll snatch your life!” “I’ll rape your wife!” “You’re just a thing, you nigger prentice!”



Based on presumptuous premises of innate animality

To make even the ‘Others’ see me as a threat and hindrance whose life shan’t be



So, go, the cultural vestiges that became inculcated and terraced

Affront a democratic order, a metamorphosis, but look: “It’s not there!”



An arrest? NO ARREST! Where the hell is the arraignment?

The inverse, would that occur, if there’d be a white boy on that pavement?



Looking down upon the body, now just a vessel, bereft of all life

Full impunity, legalist immunity, a bag of Skittles, no gun, and no knife



Wretched and bloodcurdling haunting screams and jeremiads

Issuing from the lips and throats of mournful mothers concomitantly sick-and-tired



Of injustices and indignities wrought from the cradle to the grave

Against the innocent young black boys, yeah they’re brave, yet still enslaved



In the cultural molds cast for them, slurry constituting cast-off fears projected

Of wanton lusts, mendaciousness, criminal proclives, persons infected



But, presumptions of a profile analogous to brute sometimes don’t matter

For Sanford is the province from which one of Five Civilized Tribes was once scattered



“Stand your ground,” on farce ground, grounded down through false entreaty

Reminisces of Jacksonian era Trails and tears, broken treaties



Of the law, semi-legal, posse-driven, to suspicion

The assumed guilt, the apprehension, attempted extinction to its fruition



All enveloped, racially encapsulated in sardonically craven mores

“Fashion the rope!” “Ignite the faggot!” “Shoot the bullets!” vigilantism forays



Into the corporeally symbolic morass that begs the question of their existence

The fearful stare, the incendiary glare, the trope pronounced: “an imitative instance!”



“Run!” “Don’t run!” “Run!” “Don’t run!” “Run!” “Don’t …” it’s so enigmatic

Motherly advice averred to black feet, absent track spikes or field cleats, becomes static



For the protocol for life’s preservation is not the same for mine or self

When the run not deemed recreational triggers a chase in predatory stealth



Or in the open, sometimes obscured, it’s still a kill that goes unpunished

The lawyers glib; the pundits speak; the racists squawk; Justice is banished



Down the aperture reserved for illusory principles and dreams begotten

A dream deferred? Nah! An enucleation of an entropic societal system faced from the bottom.



*Malik Abdul-Khaliq