Slow Death

Culture in crisis…wasting away

within derivatives of various victimizations and

historic plunderings…societally bereft

and weakened by degrees of

deep seeded fears of/and bigotry’s slights

Slavery of our cultural synchronicity causing

backward flowing vices of senselessness by the

criminalization and color-classification…of our skin

Though we struggle and fight…no way to win

this battle…we can’t win for freedom’s sake

Can’t win; humane justice and equality’s favor

…we are not allowed freedom’s acceptance

to smile…to feel that kiss of America’s blend

Passages through time have hardened the eyes of

the stony eyed stares of the blinded masses as

many revel freely in genocidal eccentricities…unaware

uncaring, in a battle with egocentrics and filtered genetics

beleaguered by poverty’s vice grip and degeneration into

ghetto mentalities of ignorance, degradation and shame…

the victim victimizing all senses of moral code and ethical worth

dying deaths of wasted births…

Cry the lonely mothers of wayward and abandoned children

…sages of wanting and receivers of heartache and familial loss

drowning in stale, waterless pools of despair that

chastises their fates and cripples with the weight of their pains

They see the compromised manhood of their men who’ve

lost their true countenance…

as they wane in unrealistic glows of damning cruelties

…and unrealized potentials

Those sons of sons, who’ve never quite understood

their true identity…their rightful place

Centuries of never knowing their father’s strengths and

being guided by the nuances of self-hate…the pulses

of unrelenting doubts of their fragile worthiness…

pride-less and shamed by constant failings…

with hearts darkened by the bruising shackles

placed by history’s brutal slap to their faces

…the constant challenges to their manly stature

Owning no “pissing pot” and feeling…

a “Black man’s worth”

…will be forgotten and dismissed

just as monarch butterflies emerging from cocoons…

born to die…a wasted birth*

Jon` B. Crenshaw

Slow Death

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