Keep your hands on the wheel
and your eyes ahead.
Don't move unless it's
by the hand of God
or the man with the gold shield
on his chest;
these days,
it's hard to tell the difference.

This is your survival guide:
rules to follow
if you want to stay alive
and hide yourself from
the concrete jungle’s deadliest predator.

This is how my father taught me to survive.

My first history lesson was a knife
scrawled on his back,
a valley of wraiths
where I saw my
ascendants in chains -
but they sang.

Singing with voices that filled
the cavern with hope
and fueled our hearts to
keep beating
on the bars of the rib cage
like so many hummingbirds,
hungry for freedom.

So though my tongue
may seem timid,
my Daddy taught me something about pride.
He said keep your head raised
full towards the sky
and bathe in summer days;
let the sun soak deep
into the canyons of your skin
and then find yourself in the darkness

Today
there is a boy with
a rusted voice,
fevered enough to
melt the ancestral chains
and set him free
to live in his father's dreams

Somewhere on a front porch
in a car garage
above a glass of whiskey
over the cold table in the prison visiting room,
there is a man
whose memories live
in the sunken graveyards of his eyes.
He shows his son a history of scars
and sobs like his tears
can water the future.