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Tyler King Oct 2016
The night they shot Dr King, Stokely Carmichael  pulled the pin out from the grenade in his heart and made ******* sure the world knew he and his brothers would never be weak again,

The night they shot Malcolm X, the liberals shook their heads, clicking tongues about how "violence begets violence", and sometime later they put his face on a stamp, taught his corpse to dance, taught their children that this is the fate of a man who never gives up trying to change the world

The night that Missouri burned down they sent in the tanks, steel goliaths prowled small town streets looking for anybody black, or angry, or conscious, or any combination of the three, and every time their guns went off a new revolutionary was born in rage and desperation

Who are your comrades gonna be when the cops kick down the door?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the drug raids come?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the crowd control rounds turn to live ammunition?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the talking heads condemn the martyrs to hell on a twenty four hour newsreel?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the streets split open and the riot swallows everything in its wake?
Who are your comrades gonna be when the prisons crumble brick by brick?
Who are your comrades gonna be when it all burns down?
Who are your comrades gonna be when we rebuild this world from the ground up into something beautiful?

When they tell you, "Do not resist"
Resist
When they tell you, "Your methods are too extreme"
Tell them, "By any means necessary"
When they tell you, "This is the way things are"
Change. Everything.
When they tell you, "You can't change the world alone"
Tell them, "Solidarity, forever"
Tyler King Oct 2016
I learned how to love the same day I learned how to run,
Cigarettes make the first part easier and the second a hell of a lot harder
So on nights like this where we run out of breath, for one reason or another, we make **** sure that the radio tells us what we wanna hear;
Kingdom come in somebody's eyes, a straight shot up from the highway into the stars, a kiss from a red haired girl with the sweetest melodies,
A place to run to, a place of our own, a place where we can know what freedom is and not just what it isn't
Our dead friends in the passenger seat for one more ride, alive and electric and singing loud enough to wake heaven and let 'em know what they're missing out on,
Our dying country stretched before us like a Norman Rockwell painting while we live like characters in a Springsteen song, wild and desperate and without a home to hold us back,
Our lovers waiting for us somewhere between the sunrise and the B side of the album, all open arms and 4th of July lips to kiss clean our worn and ***** souls and deliver us from our evils,
So on these nights where we suffocate under the tremendous weight of living,
We still have each other, and we still have the radio,
And we can still remember how to breathe a little easier
Tyler King Sep 2016
"You are my drug, I'm addicted to you"
Says the poet, immaculate, grinning his way through juvenile metaphors and picking his teeth with the bones of the dead horse he's been beating, Slick ******* on a stage locking eyes with every girl in the room, cocky enough that he thinks he can make every single one of them think that this poem is about them, and that they'll just -get it- , that it's just a -metaphor- of course he has no experience with drugs, he's never watched anybody wither away to nothing, he's never had an itch that took his body hostage at a cellular level,  he's a real -stand up guy- he's just -sensitive- he's a real ****** honest to god artist standing before them and from there it's all but too easy to ******* his way into some casual ***,

"It's always someone nice who gets killed, it's never some toothless ******"
Says the comedienne, immaculate, laughing into television cameras, and everyone gets the implication here,
The ****** is not human
The drug addict does not deserve life
If you made the choice you should pay the consequence
Stop breathing while people who actually deserve it are dying
Don't talk to me about the socioeconomic climate that breeds drug use
Don't give me statistics
Don't you dare send those rats to rehab, if they're going to live they should do it behind bars, locked in a cage like the vermin they are

"I thought I could stop this time"
Said my best friend as I wrapped a blanket around him,
He is weak, he is ice cold and still sweating, he is on three day withdrawal and he will relapse tomorrow once I have left, he will have been dead for nearly 4 years by the time you hear this poem, and the silence that follows will take shape, and it will whisper,
"Good"
Tyler King Sep 2016
The fight is how we express divinity in a way that is comprehensible:
Steady, heel pivot, throw your shoulder into a punch, laugh in the face of a Hell that was never frightening enough to hold you back, bail down the alley, run to the edge of the world, spit in the face of a Heaven that was never there to catch your friends who didn't make it, catch your breath somewhere warm and safe with the ones who did,
All we got is each other, after all
And in the middle of it all, in this America, in these ****** sinister times,
That will take us farther than any president ever could
And so we fight to get by,
We jump in cars and hit the highway with home at our backs and a promise to never go back,
We lock hands and sing one loud for the dead, and another even louder for the living
We love what we can, because we can
Our words will burn, our cities will freeze,
And we will take as many of the ******* down with us as we can
Tyler King Aug 2016
The party has been over, but there will always be those who cannot stop,
Not until the very last body hits the floor,
Not until the lights go down on cities we used to love people in, when the ash tray overflows out onto sidewalks that long for disease, to die, to be reborn, made clean, only to be soiled again by our fascination with them
We should have learned by now how to not ruin something by loving it
But where there is emotion there must always be casualties
I reconcile this with myself in the dark nights I spend painting landscapes of the street from the porch
I watch the summer wilt and fall apart, piece by piece, and my hands cannot dig a hole deep enough to escape the fallout
When I leave this place, all I will take with me are words,
And when winter comes I will burn as many of them as I have to to keep warm

I could never bring myself to judge anyone for what they do to survive
Tyler King Aug 2016
In the mythology we will one day weave of our lives, every night is either fable or cautionary tale
We trade stories of war across tables separated only by black coffee and the depth of understanding,
In a Waffle House in Florence, or in Clifton, or off the last exit we can bear to see because we can no longer take the motion and need a moment to rest, to breathe,
We talk, as if we are each others children, starry eyed and open mouthed to let all the possibilities sit on our tongues, wait, and then dissolve into dreams,
We all have different definitions of what it means to fight, but we appreciate others scars once they are made visible,
Like the night they took Jake to the psych ward, his heart a scientist burning  hypotheses in the street while Jess wiped tears and ashes from her face and resolved to battle this thing to the death,
Or the early morning we drove Sierra to Indianapolis, and we turned the radio in the old jeep up as loud as the one blown speaker would allow and tried to sing our way out from under the burden we carried to that dying city,
Or the night Jennifer's brother put a dent in my car and I drove my fist into a wall, again and again, trying to beat an answer out of it for why the summer had gone and left us ghosts in the dawn,
I am as of yet unsure what this tapestry will look like when it is completed,
I promise a great deal, but I wouldn't dare bet on destiny
All I can be sure of, is that at the end of any highway,
There is a Waffle House,
And there will always be those,
With poet souls and hungry mouths waiting,
To turn something ordinary in to legend
Tyler King Aug 2016
"Do you know why I stopped you?"
Do you wanna have a friendly chat?
Look at me, I'm just a nice guy doing my job, you can talk to me, you can trust me, you can confess whatever crime you think I think you just committed and that'll be evidence enough for me, you can go ahead and incriminate yourself and save us both the trouble
"Do you have something to hide?"
Come on now, why are you being so difficult? If you hadn't done anything wrong you'd have no problem taking more time out of your day than I've already taken to let me look around for something to charge you with. They say you're innocent until proven guilty but you're not doing yourself any favors.
"Cooperating will make things easier on you"
Ok so you know your rights, ******* congratulations, you're a regular ******* model citizen. You know what? Your rights are becoming a real pain in my ***. You have no idea how much more difficult I can make things for you. You think this is bad? You ain't seen nothing yet punk.
"We'll just get a warrant"
You think I give a **** about your refusal to consent? You have no idea how easy it would be for me to get a judge to sign a paper to **** your entire world up so can we please just get on with this thing I don't wanna spend all day talking to you I have quotas to fill.
"I'm going to frisk you for my own safety"
Keep your ******* hands where I can see em. You don't move unless I give the order. You made the choice to be difficult so this is how it's gonna be. You got a gun on you? You might, or I could **** you where you stand and put one in your hands after. What? You think anyone is gonna believe you after you're dead?
"We have someone who will testify against you"
Guess what? We caught some other poor ******* a while back, and he's willing to do anything to get out of trouble, so he'll say whatever the hell we tell him to. Do you get it yet? You can't win here.
"We can hold you for 72 hours without charging you"
I'm sick of ******* around here, I'm taking you in, and you are going to confess to whatever I think you should confess to. You are prisoner. You are ant beneath boot. You are out of options. I am the law and you are nothing. So go ahead, know your rights, see where that gets you.
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