Whitewash

It's this paint that has been sent
to seep into my pores and color the sight
of ignorant observers,
who think me distant from myself
by virtue of the money they believe
is not my own
the suburban home
that is not my own

the social status
the future
the potential
the possibilities I hold for
the dreams I nurtured inside myself

which
they say
cannot be mine, unless -

I am somehow distant from myself
from the impoverished heritage
that this brown skin has marked me to inherit.

That I am whitewashed,
a shell of my ancestors' strength,
a feeble mask that at first glance
seems like black
cracked out and pregnant
lost in innercity alleyways
and filled to the brim with
barbaric sex

until they see the glimmer of humanity
in my eyes, the hope, the intelligence -

this is not the trait of the black woman,
they must say to themselves,
who do not understand what it means to be
black woman, black human

so therefore she
with brilliant speech
and witty mind

must be some sort of divine
heaven sent nigger wench,
colored but still somehow
with the power to assert herself
here, where the state necessitates that her beauty
be doused in cum and white paint

until her very essence has been effaced.

Somehow she, so trod upon
by the ignorant eyes of those so blinded
by their own projected fears,
still manages to be human,
humane to those who inspired her tears.

So she holds her tongue while the ignorant man
smiles and tells her that her fertile river clay color,
her power, her filled with every color,
filled up with the starry universe color - so offending
to his senseless soul -

is made bearable by erasing it all.