It shouldn't be possible for a razor wire fence to look beautiful
But from the outside beneath the moonlit sky
And the falling snow it almost glows like tinsel
And I imagine a pair of hands decorating
A tree the last Christmas they were free.
On the inside the guards look me over like a poorly delivered joke
I'm walked into a room where there are
Ninety-eight men - two of them are white.
There is a microphone standing like hope.
I get nervous for poetry readings in hippy filled coffee shops.
This is not a low security prison.
My butterflies have become suicide bombers
Crashing to the walls of my gut.
Yes, I am searching your eyes for Jeffery Dahmer
Searching your face for blood red crime
It's what white people do.
We look for weapons of mass destruction
In the Garden of Eden
Or we cuff you to the trunk of the same
Trees your ancestors were hung from.
The land of the free has replaced
Its plantations with penitentiaries
And I am trying to comprehend
How Abu Ghraib ever made the news
When there's a slave ship in every
Ghetto from Manhatten to LA
And you can hear the chain links of
Shackles on any playground
Where the chain links of swing sets
Are being budget cut down
With little children still swinging
Through the air feet aiming towards the clouds.
He wants to be a doctor, an artist, a teacher
I can't imagine how it feels to be his mother
In a nation that will hover above his head
Like a sniper till it kills off every single dream
In a nation that prides itself on the room
Its made at the front of the bus
While filling prison bound buses every hour in every city
In a nation that thrives on prison labor
Like Alabama thrived on cotton.
Yeah, Victoria's Secret is a hundred percent cotton.
So is IBM, Motorola, Chevron, Revlon, TWA, Eddie Bauer,
Boeing, Microsoft, K-Mart, JC Penney's, and McDonald's.
Six Billion Served are served by the myth that our flag
Is no longer sown from a white sheet.
That Wall Street doesn't drag bodies down its center
The same way Good Ole Boys in Jasper, Texas tied James Byrd Jr.
To the back of a truck.
Our system is served by truth being locked up in a Senator's safe.
That truth being crime and poverty are
Crucial to the survival of any capitalist state,
And our economy thrives everytime a chain link
On a school ground swing set breaks,
Sends a child hurling towards the street
Feet once aiming towards the clouds
Now bound and shackled, sentenced to the opposite of life.
There are nine million people incarcerated in the entire world,
Two million of those people are incarcerated in the United States
America, is your rib cage a prison cell your heart cannot escape?
Is razor wire on Christmas morning the anthem you want to sing to your future?
Of the ninety-eight men in this room,
There isn't one who is claiming to be an angel.
But we all have shoulder blades that would
Sharpen like switchblades if our wings were ripped off,
If our lives were being ripped off.
The sky knows justice and genocide
Are not words you can use in the same sentence.
Children are born with their chests full of birds.