"I am tired of building up somebody else's civilization", Fenton Johnson

There are days when sunshine is toxic, when breathing becomes fatal and the love stares of innocence have fangs. There are days when caresses are lethal drumming and the low murmur of a child's

voice is a hand slap of hell flames across my face;

when all civilization is a squabble in my partner's

gaze and morality is a gun at my head. I didn't make this place.

So what if I say you can eat it! Eat it and choke. This heart-a-choke, this diet of hypocrisies, this horse feed of fed horses. This salt seasoning all wounds. Tear it down! Then wake me up when it's over.

Should I care if you don't care? Should I sweat the details when the whole enchilada reeks? Just because you wear a hat and call that fashion? Because you love the prison and hate the alien? Don't come to me whining about your lost glories' they are the lashes

on slave skin, the gold stolen off the blanket of stones

called our land; they are the tongues cut from wiser heads, the deflowered, dehydrated sirens that called you, then were slaughtered.

Don't cry for me Argentina or Pennsylvania for that matter. You say I'm no good, but my pathologies are what's keeping me from cutting your throats.

All enslavers. All exploiters. All engravers of God-money.

You who see my children and go insane,

who wear the flesh of Nahuas like shiny suits,

who have Black Hills in your nightmares,

who eat with Che's severed hands,

who feed your wives to dogs on cracked plates,

who provide heroin to chiseled daughters,

who bathe in the Trail of Tears,

who sell tickets to the Middle Passage,

whose academies hold literature hostage,

whose culture crumbles in the hand

of a glue-sniffing Chicano child.