Letter to a Moving Target.. Michael Guinn

 

I was nominated by Joanna Svensson to participate in the poetic marathon #PeetMeNotLeave.
During eight days now I am publishing my own poems along with photographs.
Each day I will nominate one of my friends to do the same. Today I will nominate Brianna Coleman to take part and to nominate one of her poetic friends!

COME BACK HOME! (Letter to a Moving Target)
by Mike Guinn

Dear Son,
This life is nothing but Saturday night autopsies, pre-ordered grave stones, a freedom you'll never know. It's hoping the Negro National Anthem justifies your skin just enough for you to realize that tattoos and K2 will never replace the scar tissue on your soul.

Your heritage is more than rope burns around history's black neck. It’s a deep desire for survival no matter how loudly homicide speaks of rivers.
This melanin is so rich that when this nation denies you your color, it will be impossible to feel safe in this house arrest called America.

And even after you've given this country all of your Africa and your life light goes dim because the sun refused you immunity. You'll realize that our fragile lives began on the back porch of shotgun houses, where camouflaged chalk lines silhouette themselves in the shade of a lonely bulls-eye searching for another black target and you already fit the profile!

And it's not your fault that you were born a verb in past tense, an unwilling subject in a sentence that kept on running.

This curse, this prison we call life is like playing peekaboo with Satan. And I'lI be that gospel stripper, quoting scripture, god's reluctant theologian. Because here you are, fractured by the manner in which the wind whistled and Emmett-Tilled your future.

Boy my love is rugged remnants of pain polished smooth by trial and error. It knows your heart like skeletons know crowded closets.

These streets will eat and rip and tear you apart SON!
They are as relentless as hurricanes and as unforgiving as white privilege. And I am dying inside the way this life intended, but not you!
You will not be blood stains on sidewalks or a redundancy of clichés rewinding themselves into tornadoes of fully refurbished lies.

You will not sag or smoke or walk around here entitled with the audacity to hold up clean hands like this world owes you something.
Because it don't.

Listen...I don't want your existence to be another statistic on the back page of history.
This life needs to know that if you died, at least you stood for something far more substantial than a bag of weed or pride.

There are good things to come son. But you have to be here to see em.
So do me a favor, lose the attitude, put down your ego, pull up yo pants and remember this!
That whether it be cop or stranger Just SHUT YO MOUTH. SMILE! STAY ALIVE...and Bring Yo Ass Home!

Cause these streets don't give a damn about young black men.

Reprinted by permission from Crying in Colors (Jazzy Kitty Publishing, 2010) by spoken-word poet and motivational speaker Mike Guinn.

©® Michael Guinn
© Private picture Mike Guinn Entertainment