Door knock Push Fittin’ to fight
You took You owe Hold the gun
Wrassling to the floor Pulled punches
Do something Shoot Slump Run
Thirty seconds.
That face. Filled with smile,
big, boyish, fuzzy cheeked.
“I was born to be a good
role model for my younger siblings,
I was steered away
from being a family man
to a fighting and angry man.”
I won’t know him as a man,
See no anger in him as a boy.
Unformed. Uninformed.
A seedling only beginning to sprout.
Those thirty seconds,
now thirty years.
The sentences weigh heavy on me,
not the seconds or the years-
the sixteen,
seventeen turned eighteen
spent being a boy
sitting at a desk
writing a song of himself.
Thirty years.
I was born
to be a good role model,
I was steered away
by someone else’s beef,
she gave me the gun,
told me to shoot,
I’ve got no fight in me,
he won’t be a family man
I won’t either.