Notes About The Poem
Dickens said that the law is an ass. Perhaps it was in his day. Today it is more of a chameleon in ass skin. Welcome to the age of tailor-made justice.
Black Lives
When a man stepped out his childhood home,
planting a brave foot in the open world, not an age,
not a generation, not a world ago,
There breathed and burned in him hope shared with
mama's receding figure frozen in prayer by the
doorpost to his back
That his way he would make through this mild wild
that law and claw both make the world with flesh
unmarred by scratch or patch.
"You'll keep out of trouble if you behave yourself,"
she would advise.
That, sure, was the wisdom of her world, her old
world now long gone,
When the law was still a genuine ass, not a
chameleon in ass skin,
That turns deathly black when around blacks and
pristine white when around whites.
Black or white, all will rue the loss of that world
when a man was safe if he behaved himself.
Nowadays, he'll keep out of trouble
Only if he behaves himself,
The police behave themselves,
And court behaves itself.
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