Alixa Garcia

Tajeme

You could hear the sound

Of the steel against his body

Still

Ricocheting throughout our ribcages

The day we lost him

Our hearts

Excavated out

Left a hollow impression of life

Like the 6-foot hole in the ground they put him in

Our spirits bent with the weight of his casket

The winter threatened to crack us open like the autopsy report

And the newspaper clippings

I’m sure his mama cut and saved

For fear of missing him too much

We pulled from the sky

And collected puddles on our collarbones

She tucked herself into the folded edges of her son’s eulogy

We all walked around like question marks for weeks

Backs so round

Knees threatened to buckle

It’s a dangerous place to find yourself

Angry

With no answers

With no solid ground to stand on

We were floating sage

No lights on this stage

These weren’t actors

On the block they killed him

The cops laughed at us

For burning candles

And I wondered who had taken their humanity

Not even Hollywood could have conjured up this sickness

I wondered about the preacher

Whose voice riddled Bible passages throughout the funeral

And compared his love to the love of Jesus

But misrepresented this poet

Who wrote proses for the universe’s stolen moments

When he asked all the men

To either unwrap their heads

Or leave God’s home

With their anger still woven within them

His God doesn’t have arms wide enough

For the Rastas

The Muslims

The Jews

The mourners

Tajeme’s friends

Who pay homage by covering their entry way to heaven

People have a million ways of disrespecting life

You don’t have to pull a trigger

But somebody shot him

Multiple times in the chest and arms

To pay back someone’s miscalculated footing

We don’t know what happened

All we know is that the NYPD sees

Black

Male

6 feet 5 inches

Gun violence

And I have to laugh to keep from crying

Think of Chris Rock when I think of bullet prices

Statistics can feel like sugar in the sun

To an already open sore

25 cent for a round of bullets?

It costs less than a penny to kill a human

A brother

An artist

A giver

A believer of life

A dreamer of the impossible

A carpenter

Who painted colorful walls on his days off

For disabled children

And made their living in a room possible

A magic maker

Who grabbed your hands

And made the impractical, toss-able

An open door

The Cheshire Cat’s smile on a broke journey

The wind against your back

If you were hauling ass

Or moving

From this side to the other side Brooklyn

It didn’t matter

His hands were big

Curled into a fist his heart was bigger

A sunlight keeper

We know the stars whitewashed his soul

on his way to the creator

And left no sign of gun powder

Or the smell of fear on his killers

A penny for a death can cost a fortune to your spirit

And all this violence paints, is a people not worth living

In a culture that only incarcerates the darkest children

My heart is bleeding from the cold slap insult of ignorance

A post-traumatic slave syndrome

Where we settle arguments

Like slave keepers

Who planted these seeds?

And who’s gonna reap them?

Television already brainwashing our self image

Got us scared of looking deep

Cause we’re scared of the dark

And black is bad

And the depth of our soul is a black hole

That might stretch time and reinvent the unknown

From impossible to unbelievable

So we tell white lies to our inner children

And hope the root cause of this tree

Is strong enough to keep this landslide from slipping

But we’re dripping more than sweat

Playing the wrong hand we’ve been given

Even though none of us can believe it

My brother’s death is not a coincidence

It’s a catalyst for reconfiguring

The sacred geometry of living