Black Men Deserve to Grow

Navigating uncharted territories 

GPSs misplaced us like our streets signs didn’t fit their puzzles

Like our alley ways and our avenues aren’t named after their fathers or their plantations 

Like our blues weren’t rewritten and reorchestrated to the tunes of their blue grass symphonies 

Like we’re not making the absolute best of our blunder giving smiles to the sun hoping daylight savings don’t rob us of our innocence 

They built bike lanes and community gardens on our graveyards, they took the idea of the mom and pop stores, gift wrapped it, and replaced it with Black Friday 

A generation grew up one day and took their dreams and resources with them 

We poured our tears onto hyperbole streets of gold, that if travelled correctly, could make fast money seem so easy

Airplanes were unseen and the only transit we had to fly came in a shell casing with our names on it

Mine said little Bill

An alias like we had 

Maybe concealing our true identities made us feel kin to those heroes we saw in motion picture or just maybe nicknames are so ingrained into our heritage it suits us to avoid judgement in life’s trials

We learned to gather the de ja vus of our futures into a single moments time that we’ll brief before we take our last breaths

The fable that is time

Courses through our veins living simply for that moment when the movement stops 

Most of us have seen it over and over in our dreams.

I’ve never in my life mourned for someone I didn’t know like I have for Adolph thorton

My heart aches for his children, tears drench my souls vessel as if my daughter loss her father. I can’t help but place myself there wondering how he felt beyond the physical pain, what he was thinking, which past moments flashed his sites as gunfire filled the room. True he was one of the city’s sons but he belonged to his family. I hurt for them. And as his old lady says 

Black men deserve to grow old