On Sean Taylor's Death

I wrote this in the days when Miami was consumed with the news of yet another senseless killing, I live near the University of Miami, and my sister goes to the high school he attended.

It's exhausting, tiring, the number of lives guns take. Whatever you may think of his involvement in anything shady, it was a pointless loss. And shame on us for indulging in salacious media reporting, as though whenever a black man dies he must have been involved in crime, we seem to believe that violence afflicts the deserving when the victim is black). I understand that, it's self protective. It's easier to live in a world where the poor people are supposed to be poor because they just don't try hard enough, where people who die violently had it coming, and good fortune belongs to the deserving.

The alternative, a world where this violence is pointless and unnecessary, well that's hard to stomach.

Here's what I wrote:

On Sean Taylor's Death

another one
another son, brother, father, future
ended pierced for another's transgressions
a sacrifice no one called for
it was not required
and i suspect destiny did not foreordain
was he sent to die
like this

blessed are those who die senselessly
before their time?
that is not written
blessed are those who mourn
and mourn

we fear for our sons our brothers
in this city by the sea.

born black means destined to be taken too soon?

where to run?
how to turn the big machine around?

i want to drape my skirts around me
fold my brothers in
give my brothers a flashlight
or invisibility rings

i've read derrida i can theorize on race as a social construct
write philosophical treatises

and maybe it's bullshit
but we reason, as the rastas say,
we reason
i write so the screams don't burn me up
from the inside

where to turn?
is numbing the saving grace, if only i could learn it

do we let ourselves feel
so much we could break
explode something
or let the scream catch paper on fire
let it burn
or else pass the chalice to disappear
into the blood and the body

if only we could

vulnerable to loss
we wail now

because another bullet
took another son.