Nothing to Worry About
By Remi Kanazi
the world is a messed-up place
rolled off your tongue
like an arrogant excuse
it's easy to say that
when drone strikes aren't
leveling your block in Brooklyn
when stop-and-frisk isn't
haunting your every move
when your baby's
blood-spattered body isn't
plastered onto your
Park Slope avenue
Black men make up 40%
of the US prison population
nearly half for drugs that
white men abuse at a higher rate
drunk driving kills
more than crack
but DUIs don't attract
five-year sentences
don't see Jim Crow signage
in courtyards, but the same structures
still shackle the ankles of Black inmates
we spend
2.1 million dollars a year
to put a soldier in Afghanistan
35 thousand to lock a Black kid
up with racist laws
a third of that on education
and only 15 thousand dollars
on a minimum-wage job
pundits pontificate on
the color-blind era
we live in
where race gets
thrown out of the class
struggle
and intersecting systems
of oppression get no airtime
the world is a messed-up place
and you seem to be profiting nicely
noise-canceling headphones
blocking out ambulance and
police sirens in the faint distance
a Palestinian kid was shot in the back
the bullet subsidized by your tax dollars
the guy who used to deliver your weed
was just sentenced to eight years
in prison with no priors
the drone buzzing will be heard
one day over Brooklyn, but it will
skip your gentrified neighborhood
you have nothing to worry about
we don't want this messed-up world
to crash your baby's lullaby
Copyright Credit: Remi Kanazi, "Nothing to Worry About" from Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine. Copyright © 2015 by Remi Kanazi. Reprinted by permission of Haymarket Books.
Source: Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2015)