Protector | 2020

ever been pushed down, with your head to the ground and a knee to your neck while your lungs grasp for air, the air that's the plentiful outside if you're blue can't breathe, asthmatic, plastic bag forced over your head like you're underwater, like a man charged into your home and grabbed you sunk you into the depths of your own sink and went outside and took a stroll a knee on the grass, too much to bear for a care-free, goldfish hedon this private mental eden, protect it, purge it, of anything breaking heaven take a breath, and a brush, a flourish and a wreath, and an amen and a tweet to cover your guilt flip the quilt of black faces, the blood, to the other side, the dizzying iridescent plastic print of happiness now it's free-wheeling, burning, bring the conniving down to their knees put the flames on speaker for the country to feel what's been said for centuries unaired while the synecdoche plays, and the anesthesia wears, the tear gas looming in your midst take a sign, loot the screen, fill the time, let the names marquee all day through the night-time the television's home, and it's free, and on the screens your family's being stifled [after a summer of police murders]