YOU MAD?! by Robalū Gibsun

YOU MAD?!

by Robalū Gibsun

YOU MAD white man’s interstate paved over your greatgreatgrandpappy’s grave, huh? Your African ancestors braved the disease-plagued bowels of a slaveship, for you to die in the bowels of a project you still ain’t human, you property, an object raised on, cartoons and corn syrup, coughing done played outside too long, when Whiteman in black van was plotting your demise pressing the exhaust and the hood is a gas chamber your people caught in as the money falling out your family’s wallet builds more jails to keep your people barred in

YOU MAD, reflecting on back when them drug boys robbed that delicatessen, ran back to the block and sold your mama ROBitussin to rock you back to sleep on nights mama kept fussin with your father, ‘cause that nigga was too bitch to be husband, but dog enough to tuck his tail and get married to hustling, YOU MAD at your father, who’d rather raise a gang of drug boys on the corner who sprout up like roses to get chopped by choppers and escorted to the coroner or who slang to suckers like your mother who dropped you off at your aunt and uncle’s so you wouldn’t see her on the corner strung out, struggling

YOU MAD at your aunt and uncle, ‘cause the lullabies they sang couldn’t rock you back to sleep on nights gun barrels kept cussin, too loud POW POW POW whole block stop-drop-and rolled to the ground same way fire hoses baptized niggas in the south YOU MAD ‘cause now instead of water, innocent sons and daughters with no armor get sprayed—with bullets and we all know it was a nigga’s finger who pulled it

and the black boys, doctors forget to diagnose as doomed kids, harden into niggas who listen to AKKK-KKKKKill a nigga music

YOU MAD but you too broke down to move quick staring out the window wishing you could scribe a new script but you sit, watching black boys act in the wrong recital spirits shifting from life-loving to homicidal blinded by blood in their eyes that’ll never dry but when a nigga kill a nigga too close to the one in his mirror, a nigga realize the genocide that he prescribed to

YOU MAD ‘cause this proves the invisible truth that niggas spend whole lives zoomed in/side the belly of beast that consumes them and when the lifespan of black kids is cut too thin, niggas begin to believe their melanin is a sin and confide in bleached Bibles until brainwashed by slavery’s newest cycle

YOU MAD ‘cause it’s FOOLISH, PSYCHO homicidal nigga believe the only way to find God is committing suicide so, he proves it— Next Sunday revival, they pull his body from the pool behind the pulpit

BUT WHY YOU SO MAD? Huh? Why you so mad? Our revolution ain’t coming ‘til you cut the bullshit, get up and do shit.

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