King        I was nineteen years old
          on April 4, 1968
when the bullet   full of hate
          scorn
          the fear of losing...

a nation of white supremacy
MURDERED Dr. Martin Luther King JR

Do you remember where you were? I was living in my parent’s apartment in the John Adams Public Housing Projects 156th Street and Tinton Avenue. South Bronx, New York, the United States of America, where were once told we an exceptional nation, a place for everyone…a place where anyone can rise from the depths of poverty to become someone exceptional…

Only to discover that mantra 
              only applied to some people

of a certain class, race, religion, or state of grace…

            in the name of the god and flag, 
you swing that rope over that tree branch 
and wait for what comes next…

The radio blared the catastrophic news through the heroin high that was crawling up through my veins into my heart and then brain, and it took more than a moment for it to register that they finally did it. As in, there wasn’t enough shock happening in 1968. No, this time, they thought they had finally put a stop to all this talk of nonviolent duties to the cause where the promise of the United States of America would finally be realized. I mean, KING told of the promise that 1963 day (The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) with that speech that we all had to learn…the one about…                                       

“I have a dream      RISE UP

live out the true meaning

We hold these truths to be self-evident
              ...all men are created equal.”

KING would dream about children, and white and black will see the day…

“...one day live in a nation…(not) 
             judged by the color of their skin 
but by the content of their character.”

There was so much dreaming while many slept through the sixties and did not see, maybe not wanting to see, that the powerful wouldn’t surrender their power anytime soon or ever or never. Why would they do that?

The repercussions, 
the shockwaves, 
the tsunami of angry fists     pushing up into the air

that fateful April night  

when we all knew that what had begun that August day in 1963 was now dead.           They killed it. 

Not just KING but the dreams (nightmares) of so many who believed that it would take hundreds of thousands of arrests peacefully lying on the ground and the sacrifice of freedom riders beaten, kicked, and burned to the ground along with the memories of the history of lynchings and killings and it was now on the evening news evidence that the United States of America had some long-awaited work to be done. Maybe we were so innocent and righteous as we filled our heads with heady lies, half-truths, and plain old lying through our teeth…

All (white landowning men) are created equal

              Who are we kidding?

KING was not just a Black Man. He was a flawed human being who represented an army of freedom warriors (hundreds of thousands or millions) Black, Brown, White, Red, and Yellow, a rainbow of them willing to fight the currents of history to build a bridge over troubled waters to a land of human beings that respected and followed and were willing to die for…

All Men/Women/Children (Rainbow colors)
            are created equal.

Instead, some crazy ass racist knuckleheads decided that the future would be composed of American Flag waving red hat wearing kneeling in reverence to one man who could never fill the shoes of KING and speak oratory like KING and who represented millions more who had suffered and survived and who helped build this nation. There are no plaques, rewards, or testimonials in their honor, but they live in the hearts and minds of all of us who remember the struggle and continue in its name and memory of it.

When they launched the bullets 
               that murdered a legacy, 
a representative of the promise of the power 
               that would come, 
they unleashed a fury...that continues today. 

Warriors. 
               Still fighting, marching, 
still trying to figure out why, 
               more than sixty years later, 

we are still fighting 
          against them with their scared selves, 
hoping to return to the day 
            when their freedom was guaranteed,
not taken for granted, 
   ensured that it would not disappear from this earth.

Make America Great Again. 
  

The piles of guns (pick a number, any number, 377.9 million guns sounds good) and all of them ain’t 377.9 million guns for hunting, sharpshooting, self-defense, robbing, for the day comes when called upon, they will defend the forts and split level homes and ranches and the burning cross (if necessary) and the legacy of the lie…who created this country, who built this country…we’ll take credit for it (Hint: It wasn’t just rich white men sitting in their high offices cheerfully calling cops and dogs on daily workers in the fields, the factories, the stores, the ships, the trains, wherever a job was to be had).

KING and everyone beside and behind him…
     knew the truth about class and race in this nation
the history record we’ve learned in school is only
     maybe 25% real and accurate. 
KING and they knew.  

They knew about the struggle that would continue. That everyone would get comfortable. There were laws passed about rights and duties and judging others by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character, and we take it for granted that the truth is self-evident that all humans are created equal and that we will be free when all of us are free and that there is no better time to declare that America is great…if we (that means you and me) mean it.