The Black in me refuses to watch the Titanic
In fear of the metaphor that could be found there
A scrap iron ship leaving home one day only to find itself slowly crashing into a frozen ocean and
Everybody forgets the people inside
My Black fears death and all of its incarnations
My Black fears how casually white people fuck with ouija boards
My Black is already haunted by the dead and their anthems
My Dead see itself in all of the pictures
Hears the voices when it's the quietest
And dares not disturb it's own presence
The Dead in me has seen how easily exorcisms occur
How a cracked door screams welcome to the cruelest guest
Who will set a dinner table inside you
Serve videos of black figures dying on autoplay
And expects you to ferry down the styx without a paddle
The guilty in me says air is overrated
That I must succumb to a tempest of names pulling you under
Or else I am only squandering their legacy
Or else I could care less about them
That I were born selfish and will die with a lump of coal in my throat
The drowned cannot breathe but expects me to take it's advice on living
The life in me feels accidental
The real me say the duality is natural
But then can't sleep at night
The Child in me has lost his home and is now pretending he is not afraid of the dark
The darkness says it is not a bad person
That it is just trying not to fade
And I'm am left to choose the audience in which it speaks to
And the audience is either a crowd of other or a legion on me wailing in unison
And somehow a jury of my peers sound more appealing
Even if they pray to empty gods
Even if they acquit monster who smile at the blood on their hands
The other night I had a dream in which I was a mage
Who discovered the power of necromancy
The plot was standard
I was to defeat the great evil plaguing the land
But couldn't
Because raising the dead felt dirty and not mine
Every-time I tried cast a spell
The ground would rumble
The air would fall silent
And a dead black person would stumble out of the earth
And ask why I have so carelessly
Summoned them
And that's when my tongue falls out of my mouth
And lands in front of a monster orchestrating the bullets whizzing towards us
And the jury of my peers applaud the Monsters action
And the monster slowly becomes a man
With a family waiting at home
And the darkness engulfs me in itself
And then me and the dead black figure are suddenly children again
Playing until the street lights come on
Expect I am still alive and they are still dead