I’m watching eight minutes pass on my clock,
the time it took you to die
with your face pressed into burning asphalt.
Was it something you said? some instinctive struggle
to free yourself? It would have made
no difference,
when you headed north,
as black families always have,
looking for a new job, on a new street and new hope
not knowing, the house you’d lived in forty-six years
would collapse on you, I say again:
the house of breath
you occupied for forty-six years
would collapse under a cop’s knee.
Might as well have been his boot.
The prince in his white house will have uneasy sleep.
The wind is blowing hard against his white fence.
Burning voices puncture his dreams.
