Answering Service

More rounds are fired and Black Lives are lost.  It’s a job well done, but we must take a firm position as troubleshooters.  Should we argue gun control?  Hell nah.  We don’t need the 44^th president putting his black hands all over that again.  Let’s just drop the flag of confederacy from its staff and proclaim we want to wipe the slate clean.  Then we’ll suggest we should all hold hands and strike multiple centuries of African American enslavement from the hearts and minds of the oppressed…

We Want Answers! We Want Answers!

It is your freedom to fly the confederate flag.  No problem.  But, flying that flag while you call me a NIGGER entails seeing and feeling the stars and stripes of my struggle.  The rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air will be much more than the mere words of a patriotic song.  I’ll put my hand over my heart and pledge to that…

We Want Answers!  We Want Answers!

Blacks are consumed by compassion.  They’re empathetic creatures, always looking for someone to forgive.  Hell, they’ll turn the other cheek; lift every voice and sing Kumba Yah, while our batons swing like helicopter propellers, and boots crash into their bodies with the velocity of an oppressor’s anvil delivered by a slingshot.  They’ll get over it.  They always do.  They refuse to face the truth, so we will simply tell them what they want to hear.

We Want Answers!  We Want Answers!

Comfortable silence to avoid uncomfortable truths about the disease of racism adds new meaning to, “Having the right to remain silent.” Racism is transcended through the genes of millennial babies.  In this modern day of transgender and “transracial” freedom, the societal acceptance of interracial and gay marriages, and a time when any person is permitted to sit at the front of the bus, a 21 year old spewing and acting on racial hatred is simply unleashing the barbaric truths within the elders that nurture them.

Church bombings and public lynchings are the blueprints of a Dylann Roof – style mass murder and racially tainted practice of jurisprudence.  Why will you not understand that your beautiful brown faces are no more than a statistic to the same people you’re demanding answers from?  Your existence, or demise is merely the movement of a decimal point in their eyes.

Now there’s your answer.  What will you do with the truth?

Still Livin,’

MannofStat

Copyright © 2016 by Leroy Elwood Mann

Criminal

Yo, C.O.,

I can’t remember when I stopped acknowledging your last name and you became the state drone known as, C.O. to me.  Maybe it was the first time you handed my mail to someone other than myself – as if it didn’t matter that my loved one’s words were written for me.  You just couldn’t see their words being my lifeline; the difference between me being civilized, and you feeling threatened.

Tell me C.O., how would the rest of your day go if something as intimately delicate as a scribe from the grandchild you have yet to meet were placed in the ‘care’ of someone you don’t really care for?  It’s only mail, right?

You have to understand that your place of work cages people that have been convicted of criminal acts.  Some are mentally ill with the potential for violence.  Why would you want to do anything to agitate such a volatile environment?  I will never forget the way you badgered Henry Hunt about having too much property. 

You were even brazen to the point of calling him a ‘pack rat’ mere weeks before his scheduled execution.  The tears in his eyes had everything to do with his resentment for you, C.O.  You really have a way with people.

I loathe the day that ‘Old Man King’ and I observed your colleagues showering you with congratulatory gestures when you were promoted to lieutenant.  All the while, we struggled to breathe in a nearby holding cell that reeked of urine.  I can still hear ‘Old Man King’ cussing your existence as the laughs and handshakes seemed to be unending.  You do remember James King, right?

If you do, you’d probably think he should be grateful for your immediate response to the sounds of 15 men kicking on the cell doors, and yelling to get your attention while the old-timer suffered his second stroke, in the wee hours of the morning.  

We can’t deny that you got him to the hospital in time to save his life.  But every day after, he required the assistance of a walker, cane, or a wheelchair.  He eventually lost the lower half of his right leg due to complications with diabetes. But, you know this all too well.  Don’t you C.O?

I mean, it was you who single – handedly confiscated his walking cane years later because his medical paperwork expired. That was some spectacle you put on that day, C.O.  I just can’t get the image of you leaving the block, and twirling his cane like some sort of drum major out of my head. Would you consider that to be one of the finer moments in your decorated career?

There was numerous times your excessive authority led to me paying a $10 fine.  When the state began charging $10 per infraction, it was no longer about keeping my nose clean.  On your watch it was more so about when it would get dirty.  I can still see you sitting where only I sleep – rummaging through my most personal letters – searching for anything that might qualify me for a stay in the cage.

So you confiscated a drawing of a stripper giving me a lap dance.  It was signed by several cats on the row, and given to me as a birthday card.  You decided to write it up as, “an inmate possessing pornographic material.”  Contraband; $10.  It is clear to me that you obviously have no regard for a Mann clinging to life.  As if capital punishment wasn’t unjust enough, I find your oppressive actions to be criminal.

If nothing, I said has resonated with you then please know this:

Within these walls, the broken hearts of people who make a living, just by staying alive, will always outnumber you.  You on the other hand, come here to make a living.

A person should wear the uniform – not the other way around.  A person would not allow themselves to be defined by the utility belt, pepper spray, and retractable baton.  The person is someone who helps.  They acknowledge it is not their place to inflict further punishment on men/women already condemned to die.

Then we have you, C.O.  A serviceable drone programmed to bark commands, push carts, dump trash, and feed the ‘criminals’ that make you feel better about yourself.  You just don’t realize the only difference between your 12 hour shift and my residency is; living creates jobs.

We all bear a uniform that complies with the prison plantation dress ordinance.  A clear reflection of what is criminal.

R.I.P., Henry Hunt (Executed 9/12/03) and James King (Expired 8/1/13)

MannofStat

Copyright © 2016 by Leroy Elwood Mann

Subconscious Consciousness

“The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.  The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.”

‘-TA’ Nehisi Coates

What is the meaning of, ‘Ghetto?’

In the beginning of the middle ages, ghetto was a term that described a European city with a walled quarter – restricting the movement of Jews.  In today’s modern era of racism, ghetto can be a mentality derived from the experiences of living a hard life, capable of paralyzing a person’s consciousness to that of a dreamscape.

“Don’t you know?

That it’s true.

That for me,

And for you,

The world is a ghetto.”

‘- War

Who THEY say you are is who you will always be.  That is, unless you can dream yourself away from THEIR reality.  But, even the Promethean dreams of me spitting truths of fire to the world, conclude with the reality of the state’s buzzards pecking away at the root of my being, day, after day, after day; bringing me back to a walled-state of existence; ghetto consciousness.

So why even dream in the first place?  Why should I want anything more than what is tangible?  I often find myself wide-awake, yet drifting into the seams of, what if:

• ·      What if white entitlement and poor white trash did not determine the placement of blacks in America’s social structure?

• ·      What if I could wake up to a world where a white senior resident judge does not have the authority to freeze all arguments concerning racial bias and the science fiction of the state’s crime lab? Meanwhile, leaving lives in abeyance.

• ·      What if it was possible for me to wake up in a world where the resident “porch dog’s” bark isn’t loud enough to alert the establishment that Me & Mine have stepped into the front yard of the status quo?

Damn dreams…

At times, my human existence is a nightmare that can only conclude by waking up in a dream.  Other than that, I am conscious of a world where black-on-black crime is not taboo, and self-hate taints the fountains of social interaction.  

I am wide awake in this world where blacks use terms like “good hair,” light-skinned,” and “dark-skinned.” Maybe if the “Underground Railroad was no more than a subway train transporting people of all racial ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, hair texture and skin complexion wouldn’t matter.

I close my eyes and the fear of acceptance unveils the route of a trailblazer turning tragedy to triumph. The truth is, your subconscious can make life so sweet.  However, the inevitable squint toward reality enhances the view of a world where minorities refuse to see themselves as a majority.  Capitalism and fascism affects all who fall beneath the standards of the Bush & Trump-type Klans; the true whites.

You got blacks trying to think white…

You ain’t white.

You got Caucasians that embrace the black plight,

And are willing to fight,

For blacks intent on being white.

Right?

“Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the dream of being white, of being a man.”

“The world is a ghetto…”

100,

MannofStat

Copyright © 2016 by Leroy Elwood Mann

WordPrint

Bunions and blisters basically bombarding a balanced base

Anchored by hammer toes and ingrowns,

Yet I still stomp with the charisma of a Black Frat.

Achilles heel burnt by the passion of running the point.

For those that don’t know,

I can go like Arcidiacono; on and off the floor

Bending these creaky knees,

Clearly bringing fire from my core;

Don’t mean I’m gonna take the shot.

Not the shooter…

These hands of a stuntman hold up 2 V’s

Cause from beginning to end,

I’m a NOVA in this penitentiary sky,

Tightening my Big 5,

I beat on a chest far too familiar with heartache…

Boom! Boom! Boom! … Banging

With fist that’s been shootin jabs since the womb.

Basketball is a lifelong love, but life?

It ain’t no game.

Playing dead ain’t real and I feel,

Inadequate is my name…

It’s a damn shame

When memories gotta keep you in it to win it.

Seeing through the gloom and smelling the future

Produces the WORD that makes a dying existence infinite.

WORD… Official… The real… 100.

WORD? Is that so? For real? It can’t be.

WORD travels fast, can only be slow when stuttered.

WORD can cut ever-so-deep whether exclaimed or muttered.

WORD goes higher than any trip or high.

WORD leaves my soul and genuinely inseminates receptiveness…

From the bottom to the top – circulating throughout,

As I walk what I say.

The Underdog knows no surrender only knowing

The 1^st place of a Champ by initially being a contender.

There’s beauty in this struggle of rising to the occasion.

WORD!!

Copyright © 2016 by Leroy Elwood Mann