Bloomed

The streets where I grew up on was no place for the weak or disenfranchised to be born. For just like the Venus fly trap it could eat you alive or crush your dreams. From the time you awake until the sunrise in the east? The dessert fox was on the hunt, looking for an easy meal to eat. This was no place for a single mother to raise a young boy into a man… if she didn’t understand the laws of the dessert her boy, surely he would become the fox’s next meal. No mercy or redemption for foolishness, weak or the meek, because the predators here never seem to sleep. Blind bullets from the unknown took my best friend one hot summer day as we played a game of hide and seek. All of his mothers dreams shattered and derailed by a nameless bullet that took her only claim to a possible future president or the next Martin Luther King. Don’t look so surprised about what I speak, it’s was the law of this dessert from where we came from you see? Our tears were barely dry on our cheeks. and the dirt that was placed on his coffin just last week was not even hard yet…as we laid his estranged father into the ground the following week. Even my sister who once voted the high school prom queen could escape the call of the foxes that beckon her in the night, as she chases the white rock to easy her pain. Young sisters weaken bodies litter the desserts floor as they fall victim to foxes never ending feeding frenzy on lost souls. Soulless young black men stand on street corners both night and day in this place I call home… waging wars on turfs and the colors that each other ware or just because of the color of their skin, but yet they all hold no deeds in their hands for this land they claim. Firmly I do stand here today, a black man who somehow managed to survive in that dessert to tell this tell of a flower planted in a place where nothing very few flowers ever grow. People see me as I pass them by on these urban streets, never knowing that I was a black rose that had bloomed…In a dessert were only a few flowers ever reached full bloom.