Note: This poem is featured on both the Born Beneath an Angry Star chapbook and the the Inspiration House CD, available now.

Over the past 20 years,
I've had a series of apocalyptic dreams.
Some of them became President,
some of them linger on curbs of consciousness,
laughing loud under streetlights of my memory.

It's always funny to hear Yankee Black folk reminisce
'bout poplar trees & Southern ways from geographic armchairs,
like red clay was quaint tourist attraction, not killing field.
Trees never cared 'bout us hangin on branches.
They stood indifferent, silently gossiping with wind
as unemployed seraphim borrowed moments of bark
to leave us hanging in all that heavenly glory.
Rolling hills echo the word "ni**er"
in a mother's eyes
seeing me walking home with her baby.
Often makes me wanna ask,
would those trees save that boy
from that mother's taut cries for him to come on inside?

Funny to hear children of white privelege
singing songs for Mumia,
bleeding guilt through word processors
and seeking absolution at open mics and in anthologies.
Since when did Malcolm's face grow so large
and his voice so quiet?
"All of them aren't guilty, but most of them are,
most of them are."
Watch! Here comes one to grab your dreadlock,
invade your space and compliment your style!
Or take this walking stick,
see how many of them ask with hands before mouths,
morbid engrossment like cougars circling a trapped bear.
Makes me wish we could go on Jerry Springer together
so I could bash in their heads wrapped in the safety of release forms.

What really does it, is females crying for Prince Charming
while he's trawling for hookers and vice in Miami.
Leaves generation after generation of guys
playing dungeons and dragons with their loneliness,
programming their sorrow in C++,
blurring value of divinity in doubt.
"All I really want is a nice guy, sense of humor,
for walks on cliched beaches,
scripted candlelit episodes on HDTV."
How many are woman enough to hold on when they find it?
How many man enough to do the job?
Sad truth is millions of harvests from couches and carpet
aiming love-loaded rifles with bent barrels at each other,
misfiring pain into innocent liestanders
who never saw it coming.
If I could fill their eyes with mercury,
make us all live blind inside convicted words,
maybe peace could be more than modern farewell.

I wake up every day, reconnect to virtual reality of
public opinion for sale; sex, lies and film at eleven,
lost Black girls eating grenades to save the world the trouble.
Wash my face, go to work, see what I can do
to make dreams come true.