King Day 24: A Poem By Robert Earl Price

In light of Martin Luther King Day, the Spy offers “King Day 24”, a poem by award winning poet, author, and teacher Robert Earl Price.  He asks, “100 years after Langston’s (Hughes) poem was published and I ask what has changed? After 37 holidays what has changed?”

 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

—“Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes

 

Is this what Martin saw from the mountain top?

Is this the land promised?

What do you think MLK would say today

And what was up with James Earl Ray

Why did we let his birthday be

Repackaged as a deep fake dream?

On this n^th reenactment of American Reconstruction 2.0

We know from his example

That we could do more to end this garish nightmare

Of bougie sleepwalkers smuggling forty million betrayals

under a papered over dream

decades of faux holidays

Each a collaboration of deceit

But no civil rights or jobs yet

Only newly legislated apartheid

While the Black Caucus standing on the sideline

Playing gatekeeper odds,

Cause all the serious troublemakers are dead

And nobody is elected without a nod from Oprah

All the rugged individuals slaughtered by the roadside

We are the children of an intra stellar microburst

Dimensional illusions dripping syrupy blues bars

Moaning at midnight fingering the artificial shaman

Practicing the cruelty of power

At the petty pace of privilege

The drones will not smell the empty mattresses

Or feel the floods of tears

Or see babies clogging swollen gutters

Or hear anguish splashing headstones of rumble

Covering collateral damage with amended trade agreements

Rebranded slavery disguised as prison industry

Delay justice until rain

Scrubs the chalk outlines away

Legal profit printed with bloody ink

Justifying Leonard Peltier and Guantanamo

Provide absolution for misguided intelligence

Contracts and plaques for drone makers

And medals for their armchair pilots

Demonize the fact checkers

roast them over burning dictionaries

Terrorize the protesters

Weaponize any noun until bullshit matters

Marginalize the work of journalists

Jamal Khashoggi was no mistake

He was free press dismemberment

To market a lie, create an alias

To create an alias market a lie

50 men wearing red clown noses

Bow to the pussy grabbers

And the wavers of false flags

Digitize it,

Let AI sort it out