Affording to Know

Affording To Know
                        by Mary Strong Jackson

                                                                        You think your pain and your heartbreak are                                                                                                unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you                                                                             read.  James Baldwin

Am I a variable, a control, independent in an experiment gone bad?
My hypothesis says everything can be two things
as sadness is lit with fear or anger -
the way a match lights wood for warmth,
or burns a forest taking dollhouses and books.
   
I predict U.S. senators will discover the myth of money
and one day eat their own, so die like saber-toothed 
tigers, fangs entwined in each other's fossilized bones 
unable to release from one another       they meant to shear only muscle
but power's desire minus love wins. 

A quantitative observation shows not 1 but numerous stages of slavery,
enslavement, lynchings, becomes Jim Crow, becomes mass incarceration.
I can own another's shoes, legs, whole body, but doing so
lashes my soul making it wither like a curled lip or a sun dried worm-shape
passed through blood to children like semen in rape.

Qualitative Observation doesn't use numbers. No need for math skills.
If I spit every drop is mine. Everywhere it lands is mine. If I use a belt,
a willow branch, a rope, a system, and hang any on my wall, it reverberates
not only the eyes that see it, but the nerves flowing to each 
of my senses lasting all my years and yours. 

Each mind, a world where I move my mouth to taste, 
call myself cosmopolitan but am blind, bias, boring. 
My foot taps to stolen rhythms, ignorant feet don't care. 
I listened and took, while the pool was drained
if the robbed ones put a musical foot or toe in my water.

I inhale all exhales, and you mine. What will a double-blind 
study show of our next 400 years or 20 depending 
on the love and heat of this planet?  If we survive, 
any variables remaining unchanged must move to a new country, 
"The United States of Insensate" named for its citizens.

                                                                              Reading is an exercise in flaggelation with no visible                                                                                  signs. The way aware abusers leave victims faces                                                                                      unmarked. Readers like victims have hidden marks.                                                                                                                                 Mary Strong Jackson



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