TO LIVE AND DIE BLACK IN THE USA

It is 2/16/14 right here in the heart of the United States of America!
At that time, who could have guessed American race relations would die in Florida!
Who could have believed the police would start executing black men in the streets!
How would have ever believed this shift from Zimmerman homicide to police homicide!
Who could have ever believed things would continue to deteriorate into Trump madness!
Who could have ever believed that by now America,
Because of the blatant war on the American black man,
That America now knows what it is... To Live And Die Black In The USA!

RLJ

(Poem 17 of 365)

TO LIVE AND DIE BLACK IN THE USA

I turned on my TV again this morning.
The news anchor was explaining another Florida shooting verdict.
The case of another adult white man shooting another black teenager dead.
The case of another unarmed teenage male from deep down south being murdered...
And his murderer not being convicted of the obvious murder by another Florida jury,
Thus giving another murderer a pass to keep his own hope alive...
Because his peers refuse to label him a murderer!
He might never spend his life locked away in a prison...
He gets to walk the earth alive and breathing air...
Because an American black person’s life is not worth the bullets that killed him...
And as long as the murderer is not labeled a murderer,
He can always continue to say he was in the right...
Because a jury of his peers refused to place that label on him!

This is just another day, it is, to be a black man.
This is just another day, it is, to cry in the palm of my hand.
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!

I often wonder what it is like to be free.
I often hate what it is like to be me.
To live and die black in America!
To live and die black in America!



I live with a large red target painted on my back.
There have always been white men pointing a gun at it.
The Stand-Your-Ground laws of my own country betray me grossly.
And I never had a vote on white’s only laws devised for my own destruction.
They say I am welcome on my own plot of my American soil...
But I know I could be shot dead standing on the front porch my own personal plot.
Regardless of the millions of gallons of Negro blood already spilt for my freedom,
He can still shoot me dead where I stand...
Because of my skin color,
Because of his falsified perceived notions of my Negro threat,
And because of the fact that no one like me should have ever be freed, anyway!
Because to the man with the skin color and a gun and the law and the jury in his pocket...
When my own government refuses to protect me from him...
What chance do I have to live past my middle age years in my America?

This is just another day, it is, to be a black man.
This is just another day, it is, to cry in the palm of my hand.
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!

I often wonder what it is like to be free.
I often hate what it is like to be me.
To live and die black in America!
To live and die black in America!



I do not care if a white woman...
Grabs her purse as I walk by her in the store.
I do not care if a white man...
Believes I am out to get his wife with my very presence.
I do care about the gun on the hip of the paranoid adult white man.
I do care about the laws that protect his right to kill me in cold blood.
I do care about the fact that my black son is a living target,
Every time he decides to walk an American street of the country of his birth.
I do care about the centuries of oppression that continues to this day!
I do care about the fact that a black man really has NO GODDAMN rights in America!
And I do care about the frightening facts of what it is like --
TO LIVE AND DIE BLACK IN AMERICA!

This is just another day, it is, to be a black man.
This is just another day, it is, to cry in the palm of my hand.
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!

I often wonder what it is like to be free.
I often hate what it is like to be me.
To live and die black in America!
To live and die black in America!



How does a black man piece together an American life,
When he has no American paradise to get away to...
When the times are too lonely as he sits in his dark room afraid to go outside.
Who can he trust to give him safe passageway from here to there?
He will wonder why he is even trying to stay alive and not fade away into obscurity.
He wishes he knew how to swim in the ocean of vast forever, lost, in slavery hatred...
By people he never harmed the hair of, even in a past memory.
Why would that man want to kill this man who should be his brother in life...
In this supposed-to-be melting pot American life...
Where color is suppose to be the rainbow arching over Paradise found.
But this is obviously the way an American black man must live his life --
Learning that wasting his time away searching for paradise is a nightmare...
As he realizes what his fate will always be:
TO LIVE AND DIE BLACK IN AMERICA!

This is just another day, it is, to be a black man.
This is just another day, it is, to cry in the palm of my hand.
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!
This is what it is like to live and die black in America!

I often wonder what it is like to be free.
I often hate what it is like to be me.
To live and die black in America!
To live and die black in America!

RLJ