Breathe

Jesus healed Malchus’ ear in the garden after it was lopped off
But Malchus doesn’t say a damn thing after it happened
It’s all part of the plan
Christ bent his back like a solitary bridge fixed to the tree
To stop affixation

Breathe

The oxygen hitting the lungs is like spun gold
It’s alchemy

There’s a boy in the middle of Illinois kicking rocks with his father beside train tracks
Shooting birds on old telephone poles with a BB gun
Every time he bikes past the last house on the edge of town his breath shallows to a whisper because of the dummy dressed as a confederate soldier propped by the driveway

Breathe

In the past
I see a carpenter’s son
Hands in the shape of promises
Strike the dirt like a chasm or precipice
Asking who would cross for the sake of murder

And now it moves faster like a whip crack
And it’s all televised
who crossed the line to take away air like stolen gold from that man's lungs?
Nearby a woman slumbers to be momentarily shaken awake to the flashing muzzles of guns just to slumber once more

Please breathe

I see cotton and steel and stones and blood
Mix into the soil like a mosaic or testament
God is this what you felt in your palms when you grabbed the mud to make the man see?
Did the dirt mixed with spit feel the grit of our future ancestors groaning for relief?

In Minneapolis a precinct burns and the fires spin and twist like the chariot that took Elijah to heaven
Did he know of what was to come?

Justice comes like a burning wind through a valley
Cleaving soul from bone leaving no stone unturned they will all bare the glare of the sun
But what comfort it is to loss
7 shots
Pressed like seeds into black soil
Did that back sadly bend as a bridge as well?
How many gravestones stand for those laid down from the same abuse?
Some seeds scatter to be only crushed under foot
But there are others only freed to grow through inferno, uncertainty, and change

It’s all happening at once

A man grasps to understand how a white name has given him so much power before anyone even sees his slanted eyes

Because it’s sit-ins and fire hoses, yellow peril, Don McClean’s American Pie, and Lil Baby’s the Bigger Picture
As they all collapse back into one

“How much time do you want for your progress?”

Because we’re all as American as they come Goddamnit
These colors don’t bleed or run
Unless it’s the tired or poor or hungry for they get wrung like dirty rags to clean every single one of those whitewashed tombs
And the politicians kneel draped in foreign cloth like blinders or pathetic shields thinking that will hold back the rain of what has been, what will be, and is to come

All they want is the absence of tension which a King said is the nothing more than a negative peace

For they’ve cried declaring enough mornings in America when it’s been midnight this entire time

Not one can go back sleep
Like it’s all some summer fever dream
There’s too much blood on the leaves
There’s too much blood on the leaves
There’s too much blood on the leaves

So freedom come like rushing waters through the valley
Wash over these breaking bones
You’ve already rolled the stone from one criminals grave
What’s a million more to you?

It’s midnight in America but all I see now is the Sun/Son


So breathe
So breathe
So breathe