The absence of light
Weeping quietly at night,
Longing for the loving touch
Of bleached white stars.
A taint, a stain, a blemish.
Talking pain, but no replenish.
A wreckage epidemic that
left behind a residual crevice,
becoming a blockade corroded from incessant
Eradication attempts.
Black,
the forever stretch of neglect,
The tightening acceleration of despair,
The inexplicable expansion of nothing.
Defined by the abyss, you see the
chunks of rough ink and smeared charcoal
pierced by white pinholes from the past.
Losing control, you look for a loophole,
While your eyes drown from the search.
It is the will of infinite density,
An unbreakable and undefined destiny,
Lashing out and extracting tendrils of your essence,
Warping you with its merciless, singular grasp.
It drinks in the fat drops of crimson honey that exude
From centuries of skin-deep incisions.
Raise your clenched fists up high.
Squeeze them, and watch the thick black tar
Ooze between your fingers and drizzle over your palms.
A stretch of glimmering elastic ebony
dipping its toe into the ground,
soaking into the dirt,
The dirt whose pores were stuffed full long ago with blood.
The dirt who lives under the frozen phantom feet of ancestors
shredded and ripped by ropes and whips.
Your parched fists pledge allegiance to
Remaining shut until the nation opens its heart up.
For you know that freedom in law is not freedom in life.
These distorted images of freedom breed
These distorted desires to indulge—
It is the extortion following liberty’s absorption.
Yet those same groping, thieving fingers
Shrivel in disgust at the thought of feeling up the truth.
They are so rigidly, indignantly resistant to discerning
All of the charred cadavers in black rivers.
And their pallid uncertainty creates shivers.
They’re so afraid of the dark
Because no one wants to hold their own heart.
Meanwhile shrouded corpses litter the ground,
tucked into death by stiff blankets woven from
self-righteous cop-outs and convenient velleity.
Murder breeds from cop-bouts yet justice is lenient infidelity,
And you choke yourself to death laughing because it
Hurts too much to cry.
“That’s just the way it is” is marketed to you
Like a falsely magnanimous proffered shield.
But who can afford to hold
A shield that’s riddled with bullet holes?
You’re in a field of contracted tendons and crunched fists,
Springing from the ground like stalks of desperation,
Just waving around and asking to be cut off.
A clean sweep, a silent slice, humanity sheared off
In the greasy back alleyway of a forsaken city,
Under the stars of an unfeeling universe.
A universe that cannot perceive the outstretched
scarlet-soaked fingers pleading for its power.
As you stare upward, broken, with blood dripping into your eyes,
at the terrifying, tantalizing blanket of what is bigger,
The unfathomable magnitude of impossible possibilities
Will seep into your scorched and crumbling black skin.
It is nothing over nothing, indeterminate.
See your own existence, so impermanent.
A speck of unimportance, infinitely subordinate.
Never knowing all that you don’t know.
You wish you could say that the universe hates you,
But instead the universe is indifferent to your suffering
And that is even worse.
You kneel in a nation built off your back,
But now that land is turning its back,
A government that runs on your blood
But flees at the sight of it spilled back.
What is humanity’s worth
If their feet can’t go without the Earth?
They’ll never soak in the awake of the unknown
If they never seek to make the truth become known.
Though the darkness will never respond,
you are like it, you are of it, and you are it.
It will spot as you seduce freedom, if you force it.
Though the days are heavy and slippery,
cling tight to hope, cling tight to history, and cling tight to stars.
Don’t unclench your fist.
Keep your head up, too.
Turn your eyes up, and tell them to join you.
The vast void, made up of us, is palpable palliation.
Tell them, if they’ll listen, that
There may be no cleaner comfort than cloaked shadows,
But obscurity is gaseous pain— a co-vert killer that relishes in slow deaths.
Tell them to see, really see, the dark forever stretch of neglect,
Tell them to let go of the Earth for just one damn second.
Tell them to see the light emulsified with the absence of itself,
Melding together to stitch an enigmatic infinity.
Show them, how it can be everything and nothing at once.
No fabrication, only fabric unbidden.
You and them must all submit to it.
Let your minds become massless,
Inky red blood rising, every part of us relaxing
in this unstoppable tug.
Time slows the never-ending fight,
And pain becomes undelivered.
We see that we were only lost because we stopped looking.
Its undeniability is a polished shield,
Our minds shrouded in shivering zeal,
As we embrace an enwrapping chasm in which to melt,
An endless pool in which to breathe.
See our ebony-enveloped surroundings,
Initially empty seeming,
But truly streaked with the writings of the black.
Focus, and they’ll take shape.
A limitless nothing so full that
Certainty is an impossibility.
But with fists joined,
The mind is overrun.
The human is overruled
By the consoling cosmic incredibility.
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