Wednesday, June 3, 2015

MASKLESS - by Myles Hodges

Autobiographical in nature - just to put it in context







Everybody knows 

you can't trust a pretty boy with light skin
/
Lies at the brim of his smile 

cheeks safety-pinned to the edge
by a pile of regrets
/
Everybody knows
you can't trust a pretty boy with light skin
/
Lies at the brim of his smile
lined by 400 years of white sin
got the plight of my father's folk
looking real real grim
/

Seems
like all my black friends are broke
but I'm puncin' in a pin
less melanin, more wins
more accepted at bank ATMS
/

Cheek
pinned to edge by a pile of regrets
Flesh
can indeed be too glisten,
too golden to be honest
His reeks
of musicians
of sad violinists
of kush smoke, coulda beens, and shoulda beens
I wonder
how do you trust a man
whose eyes can go from green to gone
in a single night
/
Check his mask.
He wears it well
/
Check his brash,
his brains and his face get girls
but his veins don't listen,
they skip curfew
No longer young and dumb,
he's smart and fake
his days are long
but his nights are GREAT
/
There are riots,
riots like slum
like the projects after Malcom's death
in his chest
From the outside he's cool
he's all blunts,
he's all booze,
he's all... ruins
[...] the ones
/
he's... a stomach
he's... Sunday Night dinner
with no Grandpa to fill the table
He knows that a father and his oldest son
will forever be lynched together by the lip
but...
/
But sometimes he comes home
and he's lonely
/
------------
/
He turns 21 in a couple months,
but he's had a fake ID since he was 14
And that's sort of...whatever
/
He wrote his will this year
Sometimes he does things
because he knows that tomorrow
he will choose to forget them
/
/
Maskless by Miles Hodges



* * * * * *
Listening will bury this poem deeper in you. Promise

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