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A thousand and one Knights

Inducted without explanation

Released into lost love

Too young to know answers

Too soon to ask questions

I’ve seen my own life end.

My heart stop hoping.

I felt the misery of the company I keep.

Explored the origins of a tri-fold loathing.

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First was my namesake.

There, there, there…then not.

My own flawed memory an insult to his vanishing.

Forgetting an existence reduced and seduced beyond those protective gates.

The goblins of the state seeking whom they won’t restore.

Ephemerant lifespans so much easier to suppress.

Yet you wonder why we don’t play the long game?

Our future’s have been assimilated.

Foregone and gone for the sake of greased cogwheels.

 

So I revisit my home

Enduring the exhumation of the lost.

Liberating the dreams of the shackled versions of my self.

I try to believe in the new reality.

That this block filled with kids and grander parents is community.

But how do I accept that to be here now

Demanded the extraction of so many young black bodies.

 

Tell me if you can.

Should I still feel danger?

How long until they come for me in my hiding place

When they realize my journey was my sad revolution?

The letters behind my name an attempt at bitter retribution?

I pray they don’t realize

How futile were those attempts.

If we save just one…

Rhetorical slogan for a good deed.

 

The one should have been the first.

The first boy who disappeared

The first neighbor

The first time I felt what this world could do.

Done to him with my name.

I just couldn’t see how far it would go.

They wanted not one but all.

Street sweepers hell bent on cleaning these streets.

 

If Clark Kent was really Kenny Charles

Bruce Wayne turned to Wayne Brown

Would they intervene?

Protect and serve the baby boy.

Clear a rite of passage to his right of passage

Let him safely grow into man.

Are the invisible bonds constricting his wrists

Too strong even for Mr. Marvelously not real?

 

We have been captured and locked away

Besieged on foreign coasts

Where the stars are dimmed and the street lamps elevated.

How do you get home without navigation?

Google says walk, drive or ride

But what of when your heart is the only transport you can find

And your soul the one lighthouse you mostly trust?

 

I will find my way home

Steeling myself against the rush of existing in full acknowledgement.

Hospitals used to scare me and sirens would hurt.

The anticipation of losses that were never part of the deal.

But if you don’t go

You don’t get there

Then how can speak your love?

 

“Hope always for resolution

And look reality in the eyes.

Then, with all the life in your veins.

Defy that bastard and rise.”

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