Free verse is the drizzling shits, and yet I wrote a free verse poem (about the oddly specific topic of “jerking off over one’s skin color”) because I like torturing myself.

In other words, it’s satirical, moron.

And now I present to you: The winner of the next 5 Emily Dickinson Awards.

—

MY BROWN SKIN BY HAKIM KANGSWORTH, FKA LARSEN HALLECK

The solar body rises and the flesh body stirs

Shaking off leeting nocturnal bacchanals, labor begins

Slaving, slaving, slaving, for aloof landlords

The alabaster face of atrocity

Denigrating and mocking and slurring yet feasting upon my brown skin

All our myriad shades of beautiful brown, trampled upon by marble feet of oppression

We drive the convoys that carry your totems of esteem, and dredge the cesspits of modernity

Food springs forth from our hands, and waste is carried by those same hands

Hands that have only done good, are incapable of committing violence

Spat upon by illegitimate tyrannies, has always been my brown skin

White skin has no business being here, white skin has no business being there

This land and that land and all lands belong to the indigenous ones

Indigenous peoples around the world, eternally bonded together

By our brown skin

Whiteness belongs absolutely nowhere, springing forth to slay and ravage

The epitome…of illegitimacy

Everything good that you claim to create, was made by us

The golden-brown just rightness of celestial cookery

A celestial mandate that is real unlike yours

We take the worst abuses over six centuries

But we remain strong

Beloved parents from the four corners of the world

Laboring under this land of plenty

To give me the privilege of writing this verse

Hands callused and muscle heaving

Digging and planting and routing and hammering

To give their children a better life

All of them straining, all of us hoping

To take our first step—together

All together laboring towards that collective dream

Of a world where we are all bonded

By our glorious brown skin

—

You can also read the poem at Terror House.