Your name is a sharp thing on their tongue
and they always mispronounce it
and it always has an odd way
of sounding like boy
as it leaves their mouth

they are still spitting the last syllables out
and already their teeth
are full with your ******
and their eyes can’t see
anything wrong here being done

now that you aren’t breathing anymore

and your fifteen minutes of fame
have stretched out
to a twenty minute story
on sixty minutes

if you weren’t already boxed
in oak and velvet
and buried under the ground
maybe you could have enjoyed
the lime light of it all

but there is no joy
surrounding your name today
but thanks to the alchemist
who turned the pound sign
into a hashtag
you’re part of the movement now

hashtag slogan

hashtag your name

hashtag another body breathing
at the wrong time
in front of the wrong fear
being pierced by an old hate
bullet after bullet after bullet
till it isn’t breathing anymore

hashtag slogan

hashtag your name

maybe I already forgot your name
maybe I’m guilty of mispronouncing it too
maybe I’m just too tired to say it
tired of being tired all the time
tired of watching things get worse
tired of knowing we could be better
tired of knowing we should be better

tired of the painful burden of hope
as someone else’s name
falls in line
and becomes part of the movement

hashtag slogan

hashtag your name

i don’t know what comes next
or where you might be

I hope wherever it is
It’s somewhere better than here

Somewhere better than us

I am the shadow of trayvon martin
Lying on the ground just as he did
I'm black just as he was
I wasn't planning to die that day either
I wasn't threatning nobody either
that day
The gunshots echoed
just as loud
when I was shot down as Mike Brown
yet his name echoes through the streets years later still
mine followed me to the grave
They don't care about me it seems
If I cried "what about me"
Who would ever see?
because my hashtag has even been drowned so deep in the depths of R.I.P's that I can't barely breathe anymore
When we think black brutality
Why do the names of trayvon
Mike
Tamir
Sandra
Rush to our heads just as fast as blood once rushed to theirs?
Does my black life, too, matter?
I can't blame you
That there have been so many deaths due to oppression and police brutality that they all seem to sound the same
No matter how loud we scream Black lives matter
We will never be seen as the living
But the potentially dead
We cry for justice to a system that's no longer built to accept us
A president that tries to forget us
A black voice will always be too loud to a world who never intended on listening
Who am I?
Besides a hashtag and a t-shirt with my face on it?
A black lives matter sign and a melanin fist?
A statistic?
I am black excellence
Regardless of how much sin you may see in my kin