Identity

My hair oil is the color of urine

And my toilet bowl will never understand

That bleach and hot water won’t give

Pillow stains a final resting place in sewage

Because I am black

My skin may tell you, “Traitor”

My eggplant negligent bottom lip

Is a testimony that I am

Addicted to food

Without Mary J. Becoming a familiar spirit

In my life of genetically acquired cravings

Because I’m black

KFC was my daddy at dinner

Quaker Oats woke me up for breakfast every morning

Carl’s Jr. always provided my lunch

Because I am black

Daddy won’t pick me up from daycare

‘Cause if he cared, I wouldn’t be in daycare

I’d be in his arms

And when my mother grew up

She worked like a dog

To keep her puppies out the pound

She Never had time to howl at a full moon

Chase her tail

Eat grass and vomit

Roll purposefully in the mud after a bath

Bark at birds

Because I am black

Epiphanies are non-existent

Counsel is like broken glass

You have to walk on with no shoes or socks

God is white

And I don’t care about none of that

Because when He finds me

I’m going to be that bbq pork rib

I just got through eating

And I hated it...

Just Like He does me...

Because I am black

Black people don’t go straight to white man’s heaven

Which is why 2Pak ignorantly wasted his time

Wondering if it had a ghetto

But mom beat the snot out of

Statistics to keep her kids out of it

So I am agnostic

Holding this little New Testament orange, green or brown rip off Bible

With a hint of Psalms

Never knowing Solomon’s song

Was for a Shulamite woman

Just like me!

Because I am black

Like his hair. His tents.

Bedtime blankets called dark nights

On desert sands

I just don’t show it.

Because I don’t know it

I am black

I am encouraged not to read

Anything about love!

Which inevitably leaves me

In the hands of any man

Willing to put a ring on the finger

Where no inch of love is shown or matters

You know why?

I am black

But the King’s daughter is all glorious within

this skin....

And that will not be treasured or acknowledged

In sin

So angels sing as loud as they can

Holy for a Time, Times, un-dividing of Times

For Every kindred, nation, tongue and tribe

To be an ethnically diverse society aspiring to be

Called free

Laying aside what the stupidity of the world

Enforced them to believe of themselves

They are not black

Or white

They are gold on a glassy sea