Red Line Poem
I wrote this poem this afternoon. I needed to do something constructive with my swelling anger:
Red Line Poem
As the
train moves,
the orange
mesh along
the tracks
where the
crane fell
turns into
orange ribbons
that run through
my view.
I am
going to work,
in a sense,
but more so,
reeling from
the sucker-
punch, you
get when
you expect
America not
to America.
Oh, the power
fake white tears
possess in
America,
Oh, what
a deft conflation
there is
between property
and whiteness,
And with what
deftness you
can frame
the narrative,
when you’re
the ostensible
narrator.
So that
a teenaged
white vigilante
on the wrong
side of
puberty could be
led to believe
the very idea
of property,
was his province
to protect,
Whether the
car was his,
whether the
City was his ,
Or whether the
gun was
his…
Only in a
country where
white male
mediocrity
is so
carefully watered,
and tended to,
like the last
example
of its species,
would there
even be
a field
of reference,
for this
malevolent,
useless,
man child
to insert
himself
somewhere
he
didn’t
remotely
belong,
and then
murder two
men who
had the
temerity to
protest against
the very
system that
led him
to believe
he belonged
there in
the first place,
and
which today,
so painfully,
and predictably
exonerated him,
for taking
the lines,
that were
already drawn,
for him and his,
and remorselessly
coloring them in.