I’m a salmon in a sewer.
No sooner than my dad popped one—
then bounced on
my mother,
destiny had mapped out my train route.
Born from sand
that bore the bloody hand
of history,
I was caught on a hook and reeled into the conspiracy
of the United States,
the land of the streets, the broken homes,
and Mickey D’s fish-filets.
I watched a lot of television back in the day,
filling my head with commercials of things
I still don’t have to this day.
That’s not the crazy thing though;
what blows a hole through my dome
is that, somehow, I was convinced
that not having these things was akin
to tragedies one hears about in Greek hymns,
that not having the burgers AND fries,
was the same as Oedipus losing his eyes,
but I suppose that’s what it means to be blind,
to swim in the muck and forget that one’s rivers were prime.
Were they though?
His-story, White-America’s story,
has butchered
MY story
so much that I’m reading these textbooks backwards,
and some of the pages are in tatters—
there’s old gum and scribbled out matters,
but that’s the inner-city public school system for you.
My hood did the best it could,
housing all manner of lost fish in a dirty pool
with water “naturally flavored” by corporations
that cared enough to feed us all those juicy fats and metals.
Look at our hearts! They’re are all big with lard—huh?
McDonalds, that you again?
Damn. I’m getting off track—wait, where is the track?
How the hell did I get here?
That’s the billion dollar question.
They say follow the money,
but I lose all trace of it in the river of blood.
One man sold another.
One brother lost a brother.
One mother was torn from under,
and now we have
millions of fishes in sewer water.
Who do we blame
for parting the sea and pissing in it?
African kings?
European imperialists?
Or maybe those Indigenous chieftains?
Is it just a sickness in man?
Are we born from a sea of stars
only to rot on a wasteland?
Seems like being human was not enough,
so we created a nuclear bang
to reach into our very atoms
and rearrange them.
Now the trees are burning.
Now the air is black.
Now the waters are tainted.
Now I am a salmon
in a sewer.
