It costs money to see our wounds.
Our pain is seen as pop art (in the 50s).
heavy as the pages it is spread across.
Raw but clean.
Neat and well-kept chasms.
All the school trips we went to were to memorial sites,
Places where the walls wore names that sound like ours,
with no jokes in our throats to use as a wand
to wave the chasms shut
with our fair magic dimmed.
It was harder to dissolve into laughter
We would leave more rigid (after)
Keeping the pallbearer’s arms from wandering our way
Our bones no longer creaking under the eye of the day.
The ripening of my Boyhood meant sacrificing the subtle soft.
We knew early on that blood bore black names best,
that prayer is struggle song’s twin,
that we are the ground the tail of a tornado dances upon.
Scattered and looking for ourselves.
All the school trips we went to were to memorial sites.
Places some parents couldn’t afford to empty their pockets for.
Even our sorrow is expensive.
We the ones who went would come back Unhappy, but bragging to our friends that congealed
blood is thicker than syrup