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by Jeffery Artist
I accept lashes. For out of African eye lashes my forefathers crafted
quilts beneath which I would later escape the weight of their guilt -
shivering helpless and haunted, daunted that"my people"have yet to say,
"WE are sorry."
WE (acronym)
white ethnocentric
wicked egotistic
would eye
sacrifice my sight in the present not to look at the past and
have to grasp the fact that i am the
alien seed
sewing oats of greed grown to feed the proliferation of the most
hideous institutions known to man
standing to this day as the corner stones of
freedom
free dumb
none but unteathered idiots weathered by,
"that all happened in the past, it's no longer significant."
With intuition's transition to denial, denial turns to paralysis.
Word becomes bond like the term "ghetto" as an adjective.
Vernacular is a jail cell in which we, like guilty children, are shackled
complacent pleading ignorance while bleeding from wrists slit reminiscent
of overcast nights that cracked for moonlight enough for the passive to
activate change, re-arrange the robery. All Americans should read
"Going to Meet the Man" before the "Celestine Prophecy."James
Baldwin called it inherent, Well, apparently, I'm a product:
odd duck white boy
decoyed by truth
proof of guilt
milk spilt in
world cup of coffee
awefully aware of how my q-tips were harvested
farthest thing from a martyr
i'm merely an artist but
when i dream it's like
i'm hanging from a tree
looking at myself generations ago asking
how could you not know
you are below human form
comsuming forms of life with no right to breath and
when i awake
it's under a knife
introducing my own life to
death
So maybe I'm not as passive asI thought. With lashes, I am
tought that karma is real. I feel the past like a salty tide
upon open wounds acknowledged in exchange for not hating myself, or
re-directing said hate upon someone else. If I am dealt
penance, but one simple sentence will exit my lips; "I am sorry."
I am sorry for strange fruit pinyattas.
I am sorry that America may never have a Jomo Kenyatta.
I am sorry for odysseys of pop culture sewn of mockery.
I am sorry for slave master debauchery dispersing blood in forbidden
channels. I am sorry the animals were often the best dressed.
I am sorry that, if by writing this, someone feels as though I
transgress. I am sorry that ethnocentric universities are expected to be
the pedagogy of the oppressed. I am sorry that, for generations, apology
has been unimpressed, repressed and manifested
as night sticks shattering lights illuminating
the proclamation that a word is only as honest
as the man who scripts it.
I am sorry that I was a misfit on Flatbush Avenue where the little
black girls laughed telling me to go back
to the boondox and stop gentrifying cultural meccas where vulchers scoop
up cheap rent like meat stripped from bone. I am sorry
a poem is my only form of activism.
I am sorry for prison system demographics, affirmitive action and
designer brand shackles. I am sorry for laugh-tracks
applicable to black-face buffoonery. I am sorry for soon-to-be
martyrs.
I am sorry X marked the spot of progress stopped with a dissenting shot
because one man got too powerful for either side to trust.
I am sorry a King was thrust forth to bust confederate
whip grips echoing in the midst of air misted by
fire hose spray careening from a resistant pacifist's brow. I am sorry
now is not to different from then and men would rather be not bothered
than bridge ideology gaps bipassed by
their forefathers. I am sorry institutional measures for "equality" are
fodder for finger pointing, annointing one side
lazy and the other not sorry enough. I am sorry the stuff of
Spike Lee films is often taken as fiction. I am sorry that what
we hear is always conditioned by how we listen. I am sorry,
most of all, for black and white vision when neither color exists in a
prizm's definition.
I am sorry.
I am living.
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