black-boy-gun

17 Bullets

 

My first bullet was my warning shot

My second bullet was my power shot

My third bullet was because my trigger finger couldn’t stop

My forth bullet was my pain shot

My fifth bullet was for me seeing my own brother’s brain drop

My sixth bullet was for my sister raising 3 kids alone and working nonstop

My seventh bullet was for my mothers first time trying crack rock

My eighth bullet was for my fathers 10 daily tequila shots

My ninth bullet was for my grandmother who raised us all but never had alot

My tenth bullet was my for grandfather who laid the foundation with broken building blocks

My next seven bullets was allowing my anger to reign for all my peoples pain

That’s seventeen bullets

With nothing changed

I swear we carry so much pain that we could make it rain

Blood drops

I was sitting on the bed

When my cousin got a phone call

Who

What

Where

My mind starting to wind

When I heard her say

he was shot in the head seventeen times

Are you forreal?

His body laying dead

in the middle of the streets

Was all I heard from the other side of phone line

Then there was a sigh of relief

he wasn’t from around here

so nobody missed a beat

How did my people become so accustomed to early death

That just to know it wasn’t somebody close is a release

so we back to the streets

But my heart felt for him

because I knew all the pain that his family was going through

As I looked at everybody in the room

I thought

We all do

including his killers to

It makes me wonder

If these streets could walk and talk

What would they do

See the streets are there for the real story

And not the one shown behind the camera crews

How many young men can we bare to loose

Before I even finished this story

I got hit with more bad news

Another brother was gunned down

And In our dying

What are we trying to prove

If I wrote a poem for every young black man that lost his life my story would never end

So we plaster your pictures on our hoodies and T-shirts
and ink your name on our bodies so we never forget

the pain that you represent

The pain behind the seventeen bullets

That was enough

to make even killing seem sane