I started this poem a while back. I really wanted to read it at my last Oakland Slam living in the Bay. It's my teaching anthem. This is the latest edit.
“why do you care?”
The sentiment echoes from voices choked up with gunsmoke promises
gone in a flash
like lineup photographs
or fathers
or oakland kids aged seventeen to twenty one.
I watch them struggle to raise their hands
like the answer to my question about character
weighs as much as their life is worth.
Like they know
like they know
how much their life is worth.
A game of quarters
A game of time
Like each passing hour
is bringing them closer
to the statistics they're destined to become
1 in every 2 kids drop out of high school
in Oakland.
That's including the hills.
Which means this flatland debacle
of a school hands 2/3rds of its kids
over to that other venerable public institution
the one without desks in the cells
Every day my kids are
trading in pencils for ankle monitors
binders for bullet wounds
usin' that basic algebra
to calculate net profit
off that doctored up white girl.
When I stand in front of my kids
forced out of childhood by a neighborhood
paying rent with their future
I can only ask:
How can you hold someone up
when everything around them
is dominoes
set up to fall?
We're making ripcord promises
& packing anvil parachutes
I don't need a teaching credential
I need a spatula
to scrape up the mess.
This is a losing proposition
shake 'em up
rollin' kids
like dice
Sometimes they land 7s
and 11's
people raise their eyebrows
newspapers run feelgood stories
administrators pat their suited shoulders
Nas writes: I know I can
be what I wanna be
then they come up snake eyes
and we all forget the lyrics
Sometimes I don't even know
how to hold my hands right
teaching on these days
is an oil slick in the bay
when all I have is my fingers
and my words
neither of which clean up too easy
Sometimes I break things
without thinking
confidence is bold, but it has thin bones
they can be crushed in an embrace.
Sometimes I don't teach at all
I just listen
to kids speak
each word
like a door slammed shut.
Keyhole shaped aspirations
and nothing on the shoelaces
'round their necks.
But sometimes...
sometimes I get it right
sometimes the expectation I hold,
while faint,
is steady
a fetal heartbeat
a hummingbird's thrum
the click
of a lock
unlatching
And sometimes in this ocean
of failure
in this ocean
of hopelessness
it's some god damned swimming lessons
or a rope.
And I hold on until they ask
“why do you care.”
And That's
that's when we start.
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