Re-Run

Momma, tell me what I see is an illusion, tell me why we still fighting for our inclusion?

My skin is brown and they hate me, what have I done,

To make them so filled with hate? They want me to bury my son.

It’s like a re-run

Tell Junior make it home before dark

If the sun sets on his skin, he’ll feel their jaws like the shark

They told me it wasn’t them, their ancestor’s sins

But I can see the resemblance, it’s hidden in their grins

The same smiles they wore staring at black carcasses hanging from trees

And the streets are still burning, three thousand degrees.

Tell me that we’re not still marching for the same fight

Assure me that my father will make it home tonight

In this land of the free, and the price isn’t cheap

Like the Movement meant nothing, still being put to sleep.

And it hasn’t yet been 50 years that’s passed,

since they killed a King

No “Free At Last!”

Still the target of the system, staring down the barrel of a gun.

I’ve seen this before, America’s sick re-run.

Same fight, same enemy, same lives lost

Same marches, same hymns, same lines crossed.

And all we want is peace, but it seems we’ve sinned

To have the nerve to be born in this land, with this skin.

I’m living a re-run, tell Paul Murray I too have the scoop

Like Groundhog’s Day, we’re stuck in a time-loop

So I wouldn’t be surprised that if your skin is black

You didn’t wait for the Equinox to set your calendars back.

No progress has been made, it’s twenty-fourteen

And they still treat us like dogs and spit slurs obscene.

Still staging the scene

Wonder why we react, think we should be appeased

Because our President is black.

They’re still killing us daily, barely keeping afloat

But say we shouldn’t complain, just got the right to vote

And they gloat in our faces, I thought the war was done

Around the mulberry bush we go,

another re-run.

And I can hear the Earth crying, tell me its a hallucination

That got us falling to our knees, praying for salvation

Praying that someone will solve the mystery

Black bodies filling the morgues, repeating the history

We must have forgotten, the justice undone

no remote to change the channel from this sick re-run

Trees whispering secrets of nooses and blood

Dirt spilling up blood

Rivers pouring bodies from the floods

And the stench is familiar I’ve smelled this before

Like the burning gun powder or the blood on the floor

And we keep asking permission

Victims of the Inquisition

Where they smiled when they glanced at our bodies dead and rotten

Fed our babies to dogs

But we must have forgotten

The hoses, the rifles, canines at our flesh

The terrorist acts, yes they did it best!

And we got the same solutions expecting different results

Watching the same episodes, of the same assaults

the same murders, same people, the very same gun.

A revolving door, America’s sick re-run

-Hatshepsut Amun-Re