Hey y’all,
This fucking country. But you know that.
Below the line is a new poem. It’s about Trayvon Martin and racist complicity and the violence we continue to do to the dead.
I was working on another poem and this one came out. You’ll see that other poem in a few days, though.
There’s also a JPG of this poem, in case the typesetting is weird on your phone. (I’m sorry about that.)
I’m sorry, but you know that.
Cheers,
KJ
regular-regular
you would have been twenty-five today.
when i turned twenty-five, i was about
to start teaching at seminole state college
in sanford, florida. about six miles away,
north of campus, south of I-4, you were
murdered while staying with your father.
spring term, nobody on campus talked
about it. you were murdered and classes
continued. i taught u.s. history then.
some
of my students were high-schoolers, too.
some used twitter, too.
some—
i wonder if you would have been a student
of mine that fall, regular-regular, what you
would have done for the final project,
a person in front of me rather than in my
lecture notes, a living subject rather than
the subject of discussion, the object fueling
a poem. you were murdered on a sunday,
dead before <60 minutes> ended.
you
will never be twenty-five,
let alone twenty.
the non-secret to studying u.s. history is
knowing the idea of upwards and onwards,
of acquittals, the freedom to move, to be,
to be your own goddamn self, is a sham
except if you look like your killer—or really,
if you look like me. you were murdered
and now you endure more violence in your
death and reanimation:
meaningless tweets
from the rat-faced presidential candidate,
facebook posts from pasty academics that
accomplish fuck-all but self-absolution, rush
limbaugh’s medal of freedom, an hour of
a u.s. history lesson in which i bind your
story to centuries of everyday racial terror,
a poem in which i rob you of your voice
again and again in order to remark that
you would have been twenty-five today.