Bang, bang, bang!
Shots rang out.
Bang, bang, bang!
On the sixth, he went down.
That ninth day of August,
two-thousand and fourteen,
a young man's life ended,
with an entire city's dreams.

They say he wasn't armed,
he didn't have a gun.
They say he fought back,
but the officer, he won.
Self defense or ******?
No one really knows.
Except the three who were there,
watching the nightmare unfold,
and so it goes:
"Michael Brown was murdered!"
"That white cop should burn in hell!"
"It was only self-defense!"
But to Michael, they said farewell.

Two sides to every story,
that's the way life goes.
You were not there, and the three that were, are the only ones who know
what truly happened that tragic night
when a young man lost his life.

So heart-wrenching a situation,
yet for the family, there is no peace.
The jury came back: no verdict.
And though they wished the violence would cease;
Turning the white man free
who shot their son
caused an uproar in the crowds.
They asked for peace, but they were not heard - the violence was too loud.
Flags of our fathers being set on fire,
dancing in the flames.
Shots ring out, stores windows smashed;
now, tell me, who's to blame?


This is not an issue of racism,
but of human decency.
The white man should not have shot the black man, but he could not set him free.
It is his job - his duty,
to protect and serve the law.
That fateful day, we may never know,
what it was that Michael saw.

Each man stood up for himself
in the best way that he knew how.
The outcome of what we now know
as the ****** of Michael Brown.

The media perpetuates racism,
there’s a different story everywhere you turn.
We cannot allow them to keep us apart,
and just sit here as they watch us burn.
Please, I beg you, from each man’s side,
it’s all been taken too far.
We need peace in the streets,
we need love in our hearts,
it’s all getting too hard.


My brothers and sisters,
and loved ones, too,
please listen to me now:
We cannot continue to stand apart
when war is happening on our very grounds.
We treat each other with hatred,
love is far from within our eyes.
How can we ever know peace
when all we tell each other is lies?

The unrest needs to subside,
the revolution needs to end.
Is this what your forefathers fought for?
You are ruining what they tried to mend.

do not date a girl
who writes.
she will internalize
everything,
carve poems
into your eyelashes
instead of
kissing them,

she will analyze you,
calculate age
from the rings
your coffee cup
leaves
instead of refilling it.

she will memorize
the way your
lips curl around steam,
but not that you
take it
two sugars,
no cream.

she will read your
palm instead of
holding it
against her chest.

she will not
blink
when you leave,
because she is
already
romanticizing it.

Doves lit in the spires  .  .  .
Two lovers kiss in temple,
  .  .  .  Unringing the bells.

Empty paper swaddles the wanting babes,
Pages crying fill me with thoughts so clean
And light comes down exposing low sages,
Though soiled hands bleed virginal to deem.

Paper casted with doubts on intrepid limbs,
Bleak as the innocent page is scribed black,
For all crowned hands have writ but whim,
To this, their epitaphs reign what pages lack.

The whole world is a sea—
A great ball of green blue eye
Watching the skies with a watery
Gleam in the round and swirling
Aye, the sea is a sauce, quivering
In the bowl of heaven and clouds
Are blushing with rivers run flushing
Waters older than the gold of stars,
Into the sea.  I see that hushed time
Is flowing as it all revolves with tides
And birds, white as snow and foams
Pure as dreamed downy wind, wings
Long, sure, set for a choppy pilgrim's
Sea journey, swaying with the stages,
Always breezy, sliding as fish do flying
In her rounding depths and her gusty
Crests and all are riddled as mariners
Who travel on her spindrift ways, days
Of the dizzying sun and steamy springs,
We all go step into deepest end, darkling
Fathoms of slip, those eventual afterwhens,
Riding the sunk, fabled under-ocean streams,
In mangled kelps of weeds, into the murky wave.

The promise you made
to love me
means more than
the promise I made
to love myself

You and I
Are water and salt:
Needing one another
Separately,
To live,
But dying of thirst
If taken together.