We’re All Wrong Here

Yesterday, as we teachers were preparing to leave for a long weekend, some students were straggling out of the building. It’s a phenomenon we noticed a while ago. Though these students spend all day waiting for the school day to be over, they try to spend hours in the building in the evening once the school day is over. So, it was no surprise to hear the students’ voices. What was a surprise is the profanity-laced conversation and the raised voices, the beginnings of a fight, we knew.

I stood there and watched a seemingly normal young man transform before my very eyes. All because another young man asked him to stop calling him out of his name. It’s a change that you have to see for yourself. I tried to capture that change in the poem I composed:

We���re All Wrong Here

u were wrong.

we all knew it.

we were wrong 2.

how we gathered around

u

drawn 2 the scent

of blood

we knew would be spilled,

like maggots attracted 2

garbage,

we were drawn 2 what we knew

would be a savage beating.

& why did he deserve it?

because u didn���t know his mother

had never called him bitch, never

taught him the no respect that

yours taught u. still we

stood there like leeches

sucking the life out of men

who are already three-fourths thru���

dead.

u saw it 2

that day, didn���t u?

u saw death glimmering

in his eyes & it angered u

& u slashed out, tried 2

beat the death out of him

���cuz it looks just like the

death living inside u

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

* I’m still waiting on the author proof for Blues of a Love Junkie. It should be available in the Amazon online store April 11. In the meantime, check out my other two books, Skinny Dipping in the Pool of Womanhood and Tattered Butterfly Wings.