After "The Incident"

I hate Old Baltimore and everything in it

I discovered a coward

A weakling who brought a gun to a fistfight

And shot his brother down because he knew he could

*

After the incident

He confessed

He knew the law after all

And the penalty for such an offense

*

He took his medicine on his bare skin

Eyes open and teeth clenched

His father's mudflap strap slapping down again

Because there are some things you just don’t do

*

And what was it in him

That he would let a girl beat him bloody

And not fight back because you don’t hit girls

Oh, but that he had the Ace of Spades up his sleeve?

*

He didn’t know they been doin it fer hunnerds a years

Spittin’ out that name like, like a tumor like a

A dirty word a dirty word that knifes past

bone past blood straight to the limbic heart

*

He didn’t know Latin or true meanings of words

That it was a proclamation of the Enlightened

To set the White record straight as they

Set the African skulls with the monkeys

*

He didn’t know the supreme joy the skinheads felt

Slurring their first amendment right like a chant

Or the irony of their pack lust licence

Or the irony of his brush cut hair and fading tan line

*

How could he when one could purchase chocolate

toes and licorice babies a penny a piece

Or pick a ninny freeze for five

Sensible marketing in a segregated society

*

He didn’t know in a boardroom with

White rules they throw down a yellow

Flag for a first offence now the present

Checkered with black pieces

*

But it ain’t so black and white

And it's ours now say the Hip

We took it back made it black

And now you own nothin’ Jack

*

But a caged bird is still caged

Poison in a crystal glass is poison still

Your devolution revolution

Is only soul pollution

*

He didn’t know the past can’t change the future

Even though it walked the walk

Paved the way Edmund Pettus and Dr. King

Would have us believe

*

But he did know that there are different rules

For black and white he knew the power

Of a six letter word which scythed the Concept

For the last five hundred years

*

And I know that Baltimorean

Knows It lurks there still

skin deep

Armed and Geddian