Parachute

You only have one life

To downward spiral into love

So turn your heart into a parachute

Spread your unicorn wings

Land softly

A Detroit Saxophone

On the steps

Of a decaying apartment

Building

In downtown Detroit,

A young boy

With a record player heart

Holds an old saxophone with his broken fingers.

He play stories of music,

The only tongue for his forgotten neighborhood.

He plays for the rusted tears of ghettos,

Garbage of urban schools.

Black children like him without a bicycle.

But with rotten playgrounds.

He plays soothing tunes

For the empty wallets

His poverty stricken mother who tries

To provide with the crumbled

Up dollar in her purse

Music gives his mother faith, keeps her bible alive.

He plays for the people who only

Gets to the see the sun during lunch breaks

And those who sit on bleak porches

Just to watch their inner most dreams drive pass them

He plays for his friend Devin,

A vulnerable drug dealer

From his parents broken bedroom

Their home is a spoiled refrigerator

They eat crumbs on their tiny kitchen table

He only has enough hope to make the wrong living

His father, born from the womb of prison

He hopes the wings

Sprouting from is music notes

Grow to be big enough

To carry all of his father’s favorite songs

To the wired nest of his

Holding cell.

He plays for the ashes of scorched dreams.

Lost bodies that pace on street corners.

His grandfather’s stomach filled with empty beer bottles.

The homeless who still dream on cardboard boxes

Boarded up churches,

Front lawns that look like waste fills,

Malnourish flowers,

The sun hardly shed its skin here

He plays for his crime infested neighborhoods without first aid kits.

Broken shell casing of black boys.

Concern parents. Every dead end.

The swollen eyes of TV screens crying sad news

On his streets they build graveyards from potholes.

Dogs bark unceasingly,

They are afraid for their lives

During an explosion

Of bloody Detroit

Gunshots,

His gold saxophone is shot

Three times.

Urban tunes

Pours

From his bruised eyes

He doesn’t write songs.

No one has ever taught him how to pick up a pencil

Or how to spell

But the next day he picked up a pencil

Begin sketching 100 little saxophones on notebook paper

Wrote: I Play For, the best way he could

As the header.

He cut them

Out with rusted scissors.

Walked around his neighborhood

And pass each one out as gifts.

When he returned home

He unburied his wounded saxophone

Played from his bedroom window

Hoping to heal his city.

 

Dairy

I am a crumbled bookshelf

overcrowded with wounded diaries

AEP electric enrages me

they never stopped

littering

disconnection letters

the roller blinds

over my father’s eyes

can never stay up long enough

to capture the sunrise escaping his dreams

his spine is a decaying resurrection

his hands are chocking machine oil

his factory back works harder

than any celebrity

his arduous work ethic earns him cotton fields

when my mother’s face is swollen clouds

she explodes into lightening

I hear the thunder in her heart

vomiting nightmares

of her mother leaping off that

bridge

 my mother is pregnant again

poverty will be waiting

with its caskets open

 abortions are

mysterious blessings

only God can comprehend

My little brother

is a basement swallowing dumbbells

a dining room

bear hugging his favorite trophies

he is NFL degree ambition

after practice you can find him

buried inside his backpack

chewing away books

my 13 year old sister

is pencil marks

her father continues to erase

I carry these closets

filled with skeletons

and twisted hangers

my blood cells are no different

than my household

the broken table lamps

in our bones

I go to college

I am no

Goddess

I am the same child

that cried plasma from

my mother’s womb

the same child of

divorce courts

eviction notices

suicide letter

funerals

Cradle to Prison

After weeks of intense editing and creative writing headaches, I finally finished my personification poem. This poem is about a Cop who empathizes with the mass incarceration of black males. I believe that to deescalate the mass funneling of black males into the criminal justice system, it is imperative that all states allocate more funds to the educational system. An excerpt of the poem is as follows:

Cradle to Prison

When I arrest Black boys

My eyes leak abandoned projects

I cringe when my handcuffs bit into their wrists

When I lower them into the casket

Of my police car

I grieve in my rearview mirror

As I pull away

Silence fills the car like snakes

On every skeleton street corner

A parade of blind folded black boys are dragged

Into pipelines of prisons