kalief browder

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they put me in an alone
to protect me from the guilty
and from the ones
who are supposed to protect the guilty

i am in an alone
23 hours a day
while they are waiting to see
if i am a guilty

i am here then
without being present

if this is innocent
how much more erase
would guilty be

after a while
an alone
brings dull listen from concrete
but
echoes are not companions
echoes
are ghosts
of my dead voice

i am babylon

i miss my noise resting on someone’s skin until i am a hum

yes

a hum

the first year is a burial
and my thoughts are broken nails scratching at the coffin smell of this place

if only someone would gift me a bridge
and let me write my splash on a river
cowardly air
too frightened of what it carries to keep it aloft

i would be
a fearsome lead
allergic to alchemy in my fall
like a celebration bullet to the clouds
reversing at its
peak

the second year
is decomposition
in a fortress
where i am neither king nor jester
and
these are not
days
but albino nights
shunned simply for being
what they were
born

my spine is a column of fists
which must mean i am a riot

i don’t remember my face
or how faces face
when they see mine

i am a
not

year three

it is year three

and they say
i am going home

i don’t understand
what i
or going
or home
are

and these are not walls
but a chamber
i see now
which makes me
blood
and
if they
release me
something then
must be dying

i
am evidence of a heart
impaled

and
no matter how large the beast
a
bleeding
eventually
stops

it is my
go
to stop

even though at what they call
home
there is a woman
who calls herself
my mother
and she is what it looks like
to remember
a face

i can’t tell if she can hear me on her skin

and that reminds me
that i wasn’t anybody
when nobody saw me
and i believe
you can’t become somebody
again
once you’ve been
unseen
for three years
for not being
guilty

i brought
an alone
with me

i am a disease

i am not capable
of home

what to do next
then
is find a thread
and fix myself ornament
from the sky
which
if i was never here
is not really a goodbye
but
the way
i am
supposed to

be

a stitch
in the wound
that let so much time
out