Blue Belle in Color

The disorder I see is preposterous.

Clean streets, dirtied and

full of noise like those inner-city

classrooms they told me to loathe

and fear.

What is all this?

The only place I see color is in a

box of Crayola melted in a microwave,

so why do I need to hear “black lives matter”?

That blue line protects us, don’t you see?

Crime and poverty don’t mangle our

freshly manicured lawns and primped

suburban sitcom-style houses, but

it’s easy to see they want to take it

all away from us.

From us, the deserving class who was

promised this bleach-clean lifestyle,

kept away from monstrous, hungry hands.

Their darkness is their own doing.

Everyone one knows you work for personhood

and they lazed about!

We bowed our heads at the word “slavery”

and admired the peaceful dreams of Martin

Luther King, but that’s all over and done with!

The blackness of the ghettos piled up,

so we left. We knocked everything down

from the bottom up and laid waste to

everything green and erected long,

concrete hydra to keep it all away from us.

Body-dropping and blood-spilling became a You problem.

So what’s wrong with this world of eternal

sunshine, brought to you by our windows

on mantles full of effervescent colors

(including some of your people)?

I know my history books can’t be wrong:

my newspapers and talk shows tell me so.

It wasn’t my fault.

That’s what I’ve been told.