VN Ford
Writer | Philadelphia, PA
This Love
We invest in our fear of the dark
wearing polka dot pajamas & eating popcorn
while Fox News brainwashes our six year old cousins,
& our cells quiver crossing nursery rhyme bridges
like this one in London, where 400 years ago
I could point to a hacked head on a spike,
some traitor’s reflection decorating
the toilet bowl watered Thames:
if england taught its estranged
american brotha anything
it was how to dispose
of our black backwards trash.
I am too afraid to walk
across London Bridge if I have to pass
an unidentified pyramid of black men, idle
beside a telephone booth.
They don’t even have to consider me.
I know one’s got a bomb in his pocket,
another a handgun or a kilo of coke,
and I have a Zimmerman suspicion
about the one wearing 100% cotton,
surely he’s strapped in a skin too brown
to comprehend, which must thaw his bones
and his pink flesh, dissolving the gate of lungs
that cage the seventeen year old heart
of an american monster,
& if the world had any compassion
for my eight year old brother,
he would not everyday pledge allegiance
to the same red faced,
blue eyed,
white policed nation
& then spend no moment of silence
for the ten bullet holes exploding
in Jonathan Ferrell.
america, how much ammunition
does it take to keep a nigga quiet,
how many trees you gonna garnish
with our bodies to protect your darling pearls?
I once loved you.
Just as jubilantly as my brother now.
His hand still has to calm the drum
inside his chest. He is a King
that has yet to endure you.
Doesn’t know love is an evil word.
But turn it backwards & Baraka,
I see what you mean.
All the loveliness here in the world soaks
my brothers & my sisters in blood, plants
us in cemeteries or prison industry gardens.
Give me back Reneisha McBride,
before she was ploughed into a lawn
with a pellet rose blooming in her forehead
because one man so loved his patio,
the same way Detroit so loves to worship
its war on drugs they had to blast
Aiyana Stanley-Jones back to God.
How lovely it is to be stopped & frisked
because you were walking in unorthodox skin.
I’m sure it was love that showered
Sean Bell 55 bulleted times,
love in the bathroom that flushed
Chaz Devell Williams away,
& love
for our neighborhoods
& love
for our schools,
& this love
for freedom america,
is why you always want to put
anything black to sleep.