It’s happening again.
A mental chain links me to this nightmare,
One that can’t be broken.
Imagine watching a younger version of yourselves
Shivering, huddling in the corner of a large, empty room
Wearing dark clothing that hides their faces from you
Try really hard to get to them and find yourselves in a glass case
Bulletproof
Unbreakable
Claustrophobia inducing
Suffocating
You feel your throat start to tighten slowly as you read this
Your stomach knots up as you imagine this actually happening
This is how I feel every night when I struggle with my homework
Struggle to study
To focus
Struggle
Repeatedly, over and over again, constantly, incessantly
I think about the pressure
At any given moment, forcing me to my knees
The Titan of Burden
Expectations and outcomes as the world I must hold high
Allowing myself and my social life to float off into
Space
It’s realer than it’s ever been now because of where I am in life.

I remember how much I cried
When my parents were stressing me,
When I needed to get my first desk job,
When I needed to start my first college application,
When I failed the US History final that I studied my hardest ever for,
When I saw my grandmother break out in tears when her youngest sister died,
When I got caught in a large lie and there was no way out,
And when I made my mom cry because she felt like I was wasting her money on my education.
Each time my heart sank further into my ribcage
As if it needed shelter from all the pain it was being caused.

I’m getting a tattoo someday soon
It’s may be of a broken chain on my arm
To be a reminder to myself that I have been through so much
And that I have the strength to overcome all of my troubles
We Shall Overcome
We Shall Overcome
we might overcome someday
I replace shall with might because it’s uncertain
Even with a Black President,
We can’t get ahead
Society is unfair
This is why we have social media activists
The kinds of people that Fight The Power but would hide from the police if and when
they were to come knocking on their front door, armed to the teeth

The ones who go out and protest
For raising the minimum wage
For lowering taxes on the impoverished so they can survive in this country
The ones whose eyes burn with tear gas and pepper spray
Until they become immune to it
The ones that fight back to defend the Unarmed and Accused
Kimani Gray
Kendrec McDade
Ervin Jefferson
TJ Stansbury
Vic Steen
Oscar Grant
These are some of the names lost in the wind
young Black men who had no chance
When they lose their lives and are wronged to the fullest extent,
That’s when the real activists appear

All this from the thought of a tattoo.
Anger emanates from memories.
I can sense the fear deep in your eyes as you read this
It builds when I call on the fact that you
Think of ways to relate to my struggle
The losses of loved ones, the anxiety of college applications,
The injustice that pursues my People

Discomfort festers

Do you wanna, do you wanna be happy?
Do you wanna, do you wanna be free?
Don’t look at the past because it will smack you and you’ll know the change
Will never truly happen
Happiness? Hah!
Freedom? A joke if you sit and think about it
And now realize that true happiness slipped away long ago
Maybe before I ever really could grasp what it meant to be
Whatever, it’s gone

The chain I break
is more of a goal for mankind
than a symbol for myself
as I sit at home, reading articles of systemic oppression that
has been rearing its ugly head forever
but has been denied an audience by the Majority
Yes, these are the things I think about
as I sit at home, alone in my thoughts
Still trapped in the same corner of the same empty room
Huddled and shivering
From how cold the world around me is.