Ode to the Daily Grind

As the days rotten like curdled milk spoiling on a warm summer afternoon while the kids test their shadows with the high noon sun, each date cannonballed off the calendar into the black hole at the bottom of the ocean with measurements of time expiring, hastily matching the longevity of an unsatisfying lover with a low libido towering over their kingdom built on struck matches that all burnt under a minute but inked a smoky gray haze memory on the negative black and white film strip. 

The flames molded into a distorted version of my face, desperately screaming my name. Yet, after a history of gravitating towards fire, I feared flying towards the sun, which hindered my development like a Black neighborhood deemed too ghetto for gentrification awaiting community funding in the form of reparations. My anxiety intensifies as it smothers my senses, smelling only lost hope that still glimmers in the rim of my nose, seeing an x-ray of the American government’s skeleton glued at the joints by systemic oppression, tasting cowardliness after learning to shrink into myself since society subliminally instills in the brainwashed to bash Black people for taking up space, hearing the voices of my ancestors who warn me with their cautionary tales not to believe the peace treaties the government forged in our heritage’s blood, and listening as all of the words stuck in the back of my throat echo through my empty consciousness hidden in an abandoned attic I found refuge in because of my worry that it will incite a riot and get me thrown in the jail cell that they carved my name onto after printing my birth certificate. Sketching my social security number on my heel, the doctor declared my body a product and provided a serial number to track who I belonged to. 

Bigots benefiting from my bereavement begged me to give them my agency to condition my submission to the system. Working forty hours a week plus with the human body requiring around forty-nine hours a day, only seventy-nine hours remain weekly for leisure, eating, showering, and toileting, averaging to about eleven hours a day where the average hostage to capitalism controls their time. Even then, the time available for each rotation of the Earth fluctuates if a person works a standard eight-hour shift and sleeps for seven hours, only giving them nine hours for a quiet mouse moment with themselves. 

Feeling disempowered because they taught the history of Blackness, painting my predecessors as a conquered race, Black and indigenous descendants acknowledge the lack of protection they face in contemporary society due to inaccurate portrayals persuading colonizers Black and Indigenous lost and should accept it, even going as far to view us as extinct, encourages the ignorance in regard to the murder of our grandparents and their offspring. There is no season for our genocide as they want to make our backs home to whip engraved red Xs, alerting slave hunters to continue their police brutality and infringement upon our rights, checking us off their hit lists. 

As the generational disadvantages from enslavement prevail in our communities while the economy built upon our oppression continues to oppress us, I cannot afford happiness because the price is too high. Happiness will not pay my bills - I heard it my entire childhood whenever I dreamed. This roof over my head that I pay for, the clothes I slave for, and the food I pray for with the crumbs thrown at me for my labor ain't cutting it no more because groceries inflated, and now I can hardly afford it. I understand why Goldilocks stole her porridge, but sticky fingers land you in sticky situations when they see you as guilty, even when you did not do the crime. So, in the meantime, I meld with work and lose myself, time decreasing at the same rate as my mental health.

Stuck with all the generational trauma and none of the generational wealth.