Bullet Points

[Soph0571]

I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
by Jericho Brown

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/05/bullet-points-by-jericho-brown-poem-pulitzer-prize-george-floyd|]

There is truth here. Saw it. Read it. Shared it.

[stillcool]

1. muted

One month ago – though it seems like an aeon – when Jericho Brown won the 2020 Pulitzer prize for poetry, his collection The Tradition was held up alongside other winners that included, among others: an investigation into a long pattern of deaths in a small Texas county jail; an exposé of the former Kentucky governor’s choice to pardon hundreds of white inmates over people of colour; a 400-year history of the legacy of black slavery; and an off-Broadway musical about a black, gay usher struggling to find his own voice in a white world.

Like so many writers who have written about racism over centuries, Brown has acquired a new audience in the wake of terrible violence. His poem Bullet Points, printed in The Tradition, has been widely shared on social media in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on 25 May. Brown himself has said that Bullet Points “was not born out of a sense of protest from me. It’s a poem born out of a sense of desperation that comes from a fact of my life. I don’t want anybody saying that I killed myself if I’m ever in police custody.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/05/bullet-points-by-jericho-brown-poem-pulitzer-prize-george-floyd