Shot Taken, a poem adapted to audio for: Lost and Found

Picture this, waiting for days, at too young of an age to drive or even walk to a store to buy milk.  Drunken haze, becomes the way that you remember every day, past the age of single digits, because, well, daddy did it.  Imagine, beatings, too brutal to want to remember, still being memories, because it’s the only answer you have when someone asks you to talk about something in your life, that meant anything… many of these individuals were never even given a chance.  When moving from county to state lockup is synonymous in one’s family to a promotion, or high school graduation, what choice or chance did that individual have?  I am not pointing fingers. I am not calling people bad mothers, fathers, or members of society – that helps nothing, and no one.  I am simply asking a somewhat rhetorical question, to shed light on the fact that in this world, things are not fair.  Cliché as it may be, we have to take off our lenses of judgment, shed the ideas of class, and see socio-economics as a great divider, instead of signifier.   We are trapped hating each other, and subsequently leaving many of our fellow-men and women devoid of even the very chance at something other, than this, than nothing.

 

How much freedom are we entitled to?
It seems to be measured in gun barrels,
Chain link, links, cuffs, and boots,
Shined, spit, shined, again,
Pitch-black mirror of a reality stomped into us
Hidden from ourselves we become
Phantoms without the opera
No notes, or words.
we can’t escape the silence
Bred into us, born of us,
Taught as law,
As a lack of rights, civil or otherwise,
Truth is
Some of us are enemies before we are born,
Empty.
shell casings, the aftermath of a shot already taken,
missed, and forgotten.

We dream definitions of what we are supposed to be,
different from that of what we are expected, forced, and known to be,

we
are brilliant beside the comparative bullshit and nothingness.

reality being, we are beautiful,
Nothing less.

Nothing short of amazing,
But proverbially short on confidence, self-esteem, the rent,
A day late,
And a dollar,
Stolen.
listened to – not!

Hear me here!

We are the shot taken
Missed
Forgotten
Mark made, dirty
If you think so,
Put us away, send us home, hang us by the thousands, send us back
But
miss us.

When only memories, you will
make us
Remember why we love
what we came from
Instead of what we’ve been forced to become.

I want not of this
This name,
this legacy of what has been made
Instead of what could have been
Beautiful.

Because beauty
Is subjective, and this subject is tired,
Beaten, not broken,
Burnt,
But
Believe me –

There is more here
Than bargained for,

Songs yet to be sung,
Pens for poems to come
Snake backed with native tongues

And you will hear me then.
Hear us then.
Here we are,                        were,                       and will be
Forever.

Forgotten to some,
but memorably beautiful
to those that matter.

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