The Hurricane Doesn't Roar in Pentameter
        with thanks to Kamau Brathwaite

& neither does the AR-15 at 3AM
baptizing a city block in metal,
the chestnut-colored boy behind

the weapon's heft no larger
than my father was in the jungles
of Vietnam, ducking buckshot
in the understory. Spooked

witless he was, he says, long-since broken in his own
way, far beyond the small redemptions our hollow,
dead-end culture offers a man like that anyhow.
I am not unlike him: almost as much
as forgiveness, I wanted a theory of violence,

a philosophy of life at the edge of the civil, some
lovelier song for the unplanned,
the children of accidental birth & systemic
annihilation. When the smaller girls
on the block drew knives, or greased
the sides of cheeks so punches

would slip right off, you knew there was love
involved. Love discolored or forgotten,
pummeled in the gut, thrown to the street
like a black bag, or anything else black for that
matter (universal glyph of loss & excess
that it is). I too was born
to leather belt & brandished fist,

learned language, first, as a trap
door through trouble. A story or joke
to lessen the blow. The present-day
is a bloodbath. We want poems that stand
as tall as cousins, fight cops, tell landlords
to back down or catch hands. We want
poems that laugh. And drink. And
dance. Like fugitives.

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Copyright © 2022 Joshua Bennett All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission