Straitjacket...

 

Amazon: 1:6 action figure

© January 22, the Griot Poet

No one is forcing you to believe anything,

You can believe in Jesus, Thor, Vishnu, or Tiddlywinks,

 

It’s as if the beliefs that your ancestors,

Forced on First Nation People,

Drove out the African’s native language and beliefs,

At gunpoint, or with the whip,

Have karmic reciprocity to it,

You say “law and order,” but you fear justice,

Hell and the River Styx: you belong in it,

 

No one is asking you to accept anything,

Your thoughts you’re free to form, and think,

 

You can’t burn crosses, lynch, or castrate black men,

Separate their children, assault their women,

You can’t repeat that to Central Americans,

You can’t murder Trans People,

Or, hang gay students on fences like Matthew Shepard,

 

You can feel how you want to feel,

You don’t have the right to turn our lives into a battlefield,

That genesis behaviors more stringent than Seal Team 6,

“The talk” for African American parents,

Mental checklists for the rest,

That might in an instant have to face a life-or-death test,

 

You’ve never had the distinct terror of merely existing,

Consider this lethality of iced tea and Skittles,

An illegal chokehold for selling loosies,

An execution for jogging,

A hail of bullets for holding a cell phone,

A hail of bullets for sleeping,

In your apartment,

Awakened by a no-knock warrant,

Rewind the choke for supposedly a fake twenty,

You might get threatened at gunpoint for the simple act of voting,

 

Your white supremacy privilege,

 

Allows the privileged few to pick your pockets,

Doesn’t work for their rural, non-monied kin,

Empowered them to storm the US Capitol,

Sedition to overthrow a democratic election,

And install in real-time the “Republic of Gilead,”

From Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,”

No doubt pleasing Vladimir Putin,

Naomi Klein penned “Disaster Capitalism,”

Monetizing the climate crisis,

The thesis extended to hate and division,

Oligarchs use to control the bewildered masses,

Escape civic responsibility to pay their taxes,

Too bad Q Bacca didn’t get a pardon,

 

“Great again” is opposite this:

 

You can’t call First Nation People savages,

The African diaspora, you can’t rape and ravage,

You can’t push up on any woman, and ignore her rejections,

You can’t summarily hang a series of Matthew Shepards’,

You can label the Coronavirus with a racist epithet,

Getting Asian Americans and immigrants attacked,

Or, ban an entire religion,

In the same breath, talk about “religious freedom,”

 

Everything I just listed: do the opposite of it!

 

I’m not forcing you to accept anything,

You don’t have the right to terrorize me, my family, or my friends.