The People Who Leap From Trees

Glad smiles await as she sinks into her coat

"May I take that, dear?"

"No, thank you, I have a a bit of a chill"

The room is a thousand shades of tan

The hostess is spilling wine and hints of sex

Her husband will always be too preoccupied to notice

The music pulses though bones, coats and reason

The atmosphere is thick and full of importance

She does not belong here

She does not belong anywhere

Her coat seems to be evaporating, leaving her defenseless

The sharks circle, testing her defenses

They are made of paper and persistence

Across the room a man has rolled up his sleeves 

describing something by waving his hairy arms

Red faces nod and laugh and agree to words

Words that make them bigots, sexists, complicit

Police sirens wail down alleyways like fist-fights

Blood and cocaine spill in equal measure

Young black men are handcuffed and dragged away

All of them

They are collected and sold as labor

The ships replaced by busses

The slave traders by civil servants

The slave owners by wardens of private prisons

The city fights back 

But is met with tear gas and riot gear

The world is audibly ripping apart

And all the anguish and hatred and pain 

Slam violently against the thick, double-paned windows

And from the inside it sounds like nothing at all

But she is listening

She can hear

Side-long looks

Do the others know?

They fill their mouths with liar's tonic 

And breath out a particular brand of poison

Their bedrooms are filled with stolen sex

Their eyes replaced by twin black holes

The music fills the gaps

It is the great-grandchild of jazz

It tells a story of young black men

Being chased like rabbits, by hounds

Chased up trees, stranded

Torches lit while men drink whiskey

Great swells of community around a camp stove

While flames climb branches

While time becomes an exclamation point

Frightened brown eyes reflecting yellow

The unthinkable becomes the inevidable

I should drink, she thinks

I should get a drink

But instead she opens the window 

And climbs onto the small balcony

The great-grandchild of jazz to one side

The great-grandchild of slavery to the other

Each crawling closer inch by inch

Her eyes close and all the world is sound

The sound of laughter in the midst of murder

The quietness of slow starvation

The crackling of branches lit from below

The breathing in preparation for the fall

The eerie descending silence of

The people who leap from trees