Burning Coffin

Joel Tang

Racial equity burns a bright sun among that veiled haze of shadowed aggression, we speak of a time where living in harmony is as foreign as the foods we pretend to eat, and yet those violent attacks upon members of our communities are considered normal and fine.

i toe the line between what is known and what becomes the unknown, to stay on one side homogenous but on the other side heterogeneous, but lately it seems no one can tell me what to do if i live in both? in the spirit of growth will they allow me to claim descent or will they resent me?

i couldn’t speak those languages spoken by my ancestors, but i never noticed i was different until society told me so. i couldn’t eat vital dishes from my parents’ homelands either, and for that did my family consider me a broken toy gizmo?

i never cried for help when my bullies came for me, because we both knew the system wanted to watch me burn, burn like a cross. and i never wailed when my plea to the world fell on deaf ears, since the fists that slammed my world radiant made me patient but lost.

treating my wounds and pain in silence, since their complacent word was favored over mine, being thrown out of naive innocence to endure the stresses, of being too brown, too exotic, too wrong, to shine.

I never knew so much hatred existed in a society built upon the freedom to choose better lives than previous generations before, but as it turns out living multiracial privies me to being an unlabeled eyesore, and in this gilded idea we call safety and security, I’ve found myself only a pawn to the habits of the many.

day by day I deal with the effects of the violent insanity, and equality feels nothing more than a slip of paper upon a myth of equity,

Hidden far away in a dungeon under lock and key, So for when, I ask, will I ever breathe?