Black Like Me

It’s day eight of National Poetry Month and today’s poem was inspired by the division that exists in the black community, where you have to think or be like everyone else. You have to jump on every bandwagon and are not allowed to have your own way of thinking or processing things.

My stance has always and will always be that Black Lives Matter, but no one and, I mean, no one can tell me what that looks like. No one is going to force me to jump on any bandwagon of ideas. I am saddened by the attack on black lives. Period. That includes the loss of life at the hands of Lil Pookie over some trifling ass gang shit (excuse my French) and the loss of life at the hands of Officer White.

We all have one life to live and life should be valued as a precious commodity. It’s not though. And that makes me terribly sad.

Black Like Me

You people are choking me

with your righteous & enlightened

indignation

& I can���t breathe. Your

I���m so much blacker than you ���tude

is suffocating me. Release me.

I am struggling to stay free.

I know the proclamation was a lie,

a fa��ade of eradication, to try to

eliminate attitudes & beliefs that kept

my ancestors from being free. But

here���s what I want to get you to see:

After being a slave for hundreds of years,

it���s gonna be more than a notion to

re-enslave me.

Your enlightened & conscious ideas

don���t fit me. Got me struggling

to be free to think for myself.

You don���t own my struggle &

you don���t own my feet. You don���t

know how far I walked, just to be me.

I can be black like me

without being

black like you. I can do

what works for me. Because

as the world turns, it gives

me one life to live & I don���t

have to give it over to you,

for you to dice & chop apart with your

malnourished ideas about what it means

to be black & free

thinking or black

& free me.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind