When the blood ran black and brown
through your streets, where was your outrage?
Why are your buildings your most important life?
If they were painted brown, would you let them burn?
When victims were screaming with their throats cut,
where was your aid, your force?
When our men are murdered in front of their children,
suffocating under the hate you mask as protection
while we all watch,
numb, saddened, broken
watching on as you attend your pic-nic, watching us
swing from a tree, eating your popcorn,
kissing your dear goodnight
while we never see the glorious dream advertised to us
in the fire of the lady’s torch
that no longer shines
snuffed out by all the false promises and lies that
she let escape from her shores

Why must your white voice become our white noise
drowning out the screams from the ones who’s bodies your feet walk across
to scream your false passions and sentiments?
When did my pain become your blanks loaded
in the gun you call outrage
that jams every time it’s used to stand with us
but works perfectly to shoot us?
When did my pain become a catchphrase
that takes away the war my mind goes through just to
breathe?

So again,
I ask,
Where is your outrage when it’s us?
Where is justice
when it’s us
who pays for your crimes?
In a system built for the privilege and success of the white in the mirror
staring back at
You

you’re claiming to be fighting, when you don’t even know what it is we are
fighting for.

So,
Keep your false words and your alternative truths
I don’t want your gun to backfire
my blood to be spilled
while my voice is choked out of me
my life held hostage
by your false prophets.

Let me hang for my crimes.
Don’t ever try to silence me
masking your hate in the notion of speaking for me
In a space that you fill within a glass room,
we can only look in while you’re protected from the consequences
of your narrative that you masked as mine.
While I die lying in the streets
as you watch on in horror at the buildings crumbling around me,
Painted with my blood
horrified at the loss of profit
Not
life