The Suburbs Are Finally Offended by Tongo Eisen-Martin

The Suburbs Are Finally Offended

Like normal-speed bullets changing a normal life

Europe serves two masters

        Maybe two hundred thousand

Here comes the state and its love poems again

Pond gangsters, postcard music, and the death mask that fits millions

The global South for children, alcoholics in search of history books, and the home away from police insecurities

Take the isolation as it comes now … the heartbeat with a handrail … the bad day in California

“A painful season/

Seasons gone sentient

                and well-dressed

                                 taken as a whole

                                                 and

                                                 taken as a whole, I mean jailers no harm”

                                                                              –a science fiction

A crisis of open-air corrections

My conscience is clean

The police pantry is well-stocked/ “society time,” they say

The poems are done/ neatly stacked on top of my infant body

Sleeping through my first imperialist summer

Activists who don’t scream Black Power/ rather Black Component

I wake up on a battlefield and also looking down from the crystal of a wind chime

Your comrade,

                            Named

“When is the last time you ducked a bully?”

                             To which I gave a reply and was assigned karma

Drum patterns and drum patterns perceived

                              I walk back to the United States in defeat