I was a small person

When my head got stuck in the back of a chair
Don’t know how, I guess I was talented.

I still remember the feeling
Fragile bones, soft flesh
Trapped between two metal bars
Screaming for what felt like hours
Because I couldn’t move
I couldn’t get out
And nobody was around
To hear me crying
For I can’t remember how long

Eventually, my father found me
Had to go get an electric drill
And take the screws out of the chair
Inches away from my face and ears
And then I was free, but still shaking

Ever since then I’ve hated the sensation
of not being able to move
Of being stuck in tight places
Anything wrapped around my neck
Pushing down on the back of my head

When I walk on cold days without a scarf
My neck feels vulnerable and fragile
When I drive in a car
I imagine unexpected collisions
At every intersection
I anticipate the snap
Then nothingness.

If past lives exist, I wonder if
Maybe, I wonder if
I was hung from a tree
I wonder, was I
French aristocracy

And sometimes I throw up
Just thinking about it.

And so, now
When I think about
Knees and necks
Uniforms and innocents
When I think about
Eight mins and 46 sec’s
When I think about
Running out of breath
It gets to me.

And eight fucking minutes & 46 sec’s
Was a long fucking time to kneel on his neck
It’s a long time to watch the light fade from his eyes
It’s too long not to move while an innocent dies

And it hurts.

And I remember the feeling, from back in the day
Fragile bones, baby flesh, a cold, red, metal cage
Could not fucking move. It was sort of absurd.
But then what would have happened if nobody heard

And the child whose breath comes in sharp little gasps and cries

Reaches out to the man who can’t breathe, while he dies

Breakable, fragile bodies in similar places

Empathy is stronger than race, gender, age based expectations

My fingers fly to my throat, and that’s probably why

It still gets me this much, thinking of how he died.

And it’s so far away from being the same
But it gives me enough to relate to the pain
Of one man, amount thousands, who died in this way.
Just a little. Barely a fraction. A smidge.
Just an echo, a blur, an imagined image

But if even that smidge haunted me for a life

then I think I can understand all of the strife

The fire and the call and the pressure to change /the world so that this never happens again

In this world where the lynchings never actually stopped

There’s gonna be a trial, for the blue boy, the cop, today

Out of thousands, participating or complicit in a legacy of violence

Even as they pass laws in Georgia

Making it illegal to bring water to those waiting in line to vote

I just want to stop and take a second to note

That I don’t

Want to live in a world where generations of people can’t know

If it’s gonna be a gun or a knee or a rope

– snap, then nothingness –

So hold your head up high

We’ve got a long way to go.

I just want to make this world into the kind of space

where everybody is some kind of semblance of heard and safe

Where the trauma that lingers and continues to be perpetuated

Is kept at bay, through the sheer force of grace

So let there be grace in that courtroom, today.
~

Thanks for reading.