The right shade

What if there weren't any restraints on color?

Just people walking day to day

Unaware that the melanin in their skin

Was a deterrent to the law

Police don't like mixing colors because theyll bleed through eventually

They always bleed through, eventually

Leaving separate but equal laws with the other two-fifths of our opinions

Their favorite colors

Are the fifty shades of violence

Our pain, their pleasure

The climax of it all is to wipe us out of history

And it's already happening

Remember how they tried to white out

Rodney king with police brutality?

How tre'van Martin was shot

Out of the picture because he wanted a little color in his life?

Young metro said he trusted him

But bullets were already bombarding the boys body

Red skittles leak filling in chalk outlines

Graffiti of mangled bodies litter the ground like graveyards

Life splattered out

In a vile hue-

Man, art is heartless

Can't you see?

We've been framed

Innocent people are getting painted in the wrong light

There the only portraits of blacks

Wanted

Segregation stemmed back to

How we organized our pencil boxes

Dark colors one side

Light on the other

Black and white contrast each other

Opposite sides of the spectrum

Clashing in a wide array of violence

And you can go back even further

Back in the day

If you asked a slave what color they

Used to define their history

They would tell you they used what they saw the most...

Red white and blue

Patriotic to the untrained ear

But every word I stitch in this poetic quilt

Has an underlying meaning

Like the rainbow/poetic veins that bleed life on the page

picturing the pains of everyday turmoil

Sweating

Crying

Bleeding

Red

The blood of millions of slaves

Beaten out of them

Whips at the tips of tongues

Stinging words crack at the black of their backs

Sticks and stones could break your bones

And words will finish the job

Never able to defend themselves for fear of the

White

Cotton plants

Were the only things black people could pick

Not their environment

Their friends

Their lives

They were chained conveyor belts

If one came out of line

It was over with

It turned out that

Slaves couldn't be beaten black

So they were beaten black

ripe for the picking

strange fruits swing in the wind

turning a sickly shade of

Blue

Bruises upon bruises

Swollen ankles and callused hands

Were all they had to show for indentured service...

Looking up to an endless sky

They envied it

In was the strongest symbol of

"freedom"

Maybe one day

They can be as vast as the open sky

All these aspects couldn't fill in

Skin that has succumbed the actions of people who threw shade at them

From outside the contours

Their lives were just page after page of

The same blunt trauma for so long

Bones snap like color pencils

Under pressure of constant abuse

Self esteem torn down for fear of them being raised up

I wonder if they ever had enough?!

I wonder how many children were brave enough

To step out of their box and try something new

To rewrite this script of discrimination

So everyone had a speaking part

What if...

There wasn't any restraints on color choice?

Maybe we can start coloring outside the lines

Or use whatever shade of culture you want to use

And maybe that big picture of

Every race holding hands in harmony

That was colored perfectly!

Not with just with the white shade

Or the night shade

Because there is no one right shade

It might be a little rough around the edges

But we all get the idea

it will bring color

To the black and white world

We live in now