Rome Returns
Rome has returned
To recall Socrates in times like these
might be want we need
when everyone wants to share their piece,
saying all lives matter
doesn’t comply with the fact that
we’ve come all the way around and back,
but a protest without a plan
is chaos to the memory
of the one who had the dream,
armed with my camera
I stood facing the blue team
who were clinching their night sticks,
“Hang in there buddy.”
His black face looked back at me,
“We don’t get paid enough for this shit.”
Before you shout, “Fuck the Police,”
why don’t you turn around
and look back at the crowd screaming,
if it isn’t my job
to look at a situation
and empathize with the minority,
then you don't know how to read poetry.
a misrepresentation
of the same reference to a reality
that I haven’t lived before
and therefore I can’t pretend
to describe it to you,
all I know is
I’m sick when I see a bleeding society
taking out their pain on small business owner’s property,
it’s like in this nightmare
we forgot that we could lucid dream,
authority only having as much control as we give it,
but notice the difference in responsibility
between me waking up at 4
and you going to bed at 3,
exiting the freeway
a roll off dumpster blocked Broadway,
I had to pass through the Pike
which had become a plywood cemetery,
Nike, The Gap, and Cold Stone Creamery,
a left on Atlantic by the 7/11
and just as I began to pull in
a black man raised his fist to me,
I stopped, I thought, I saw
the look in his eyes directed at me,
E Pluribus Unum meaning
“Out of many,
One.”
Who have we become
if you think justice
is stereotyping me
when we first meet?
We should be embarrassed
that a protest against the man
has turned into something as divisive
as a Fox News election coverage plan,
since moving to this liberal city
I’ve experienced more White Privilege
than I did in a lifetime next to a Missouri River bridge,
if there really is an Illuminati,
then what do you think they see
when amidst Covid-19
we are self-destructing?
Instead of a newspaper
I am reading graffiti,
BLM. FTP.
FUCK THIS CAPITALIST CITY.
As if that last reference is something
the punk ass tagging
could explain if given two lifelines
and a phone-a-friend option,
an enemy of my enemy is my comrade,
and I’m definitely down for saying fuck the man,
but you’ve got to understand
that that’s not some anonymous white man,
if we are going to evolve as a society
then it might benefit us to realize
that it’s the game that has to change,
we can’t still be playing King of the Hill,
because if the hierarchy
is only based off of strength of will,
then revolution will only last as long
as the man who’s most trill,
I had to define that word on urban dictionary,
like the young black man should
who stared at me
as I crossed over 4th St,
please don’t raise your fist at me
like I’m part of the machine,
that’s only going to make me act defensively,
and then we’re onto race war World War III.
Philosophy being the love of wisdom,
Socrates knowing that Rome would fall
by the hands of apathetic people,
a widening gap between the rich and the poor,
and public policy restricting new people from entering,
Physics, being the study of how and why we move,
Newton known as the man who could understand inertia,
people want to keep doing what they are already doing,
and if a new idea is paired with choice then change will happen,
but with every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction;
Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is his” and that “there is
no greater love than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends"