2. dreams like
Went to bed a boy
awoke a man in the sheets
pounding on the door as a woman shrieks
“They killed him, They killed him!
he’s gone, he’s gone!”
While I’m in
fantasy land, still in a song
but I get up, console her
I get up and hold her
A man at twenty, not a month older.
squeeze hard and fast
tears from a stone,
tears in a home, dismantle the fabric
the broken-hearted to handle the frantic
moths to a candle like addicts
Hostage to circumstance
try to affirm that I’m magic
but it doesn’t matter if dead or alive:
two black boys
lives over before twenty-five.
It seems like
these dreams like
reality.
illustration by Max Hamilton