The Darkest Pity Party

or
my shadow and I exchange horror stories about being black

I have grown envious
No one questions the quantity of your blackness
You are never too black or not black enough
You are simply always just black

Without question
Without interrogation

I envy how your hands have never felt the chill of handcuffs
Never presumed guilty until proven dead
they can never kill a shadow

shadow says:
We both have been walking chalk outlines
on the ground or against a wall

Everything that makes me beautiful is robbed in the dark
the tone of nightmares
nothing more than the fingerprint of a violent night

label me: angry, black
throwing shade

Why wouldn’t I be angry?
I fucking hate the way I stick out in white spaces

I wish I knew my history the way you do
how close you are to the earth

the origin of black love
The melanin in your shadow is a vow
two become one flesh
I have never known a love like this

Call it conformity
Call it puppeteering
Call it being spoon fed a culture without spice
anything but a crown of normalcy
The burden of being black and strong
never shedding a tear
Even with the weight of everything on top of me
It is clear, I’ve been on rock bottom for quite some time

And it’s maddening, this code switching
In some lights I split myself in two
To fit into a workplace
where
I am tokenized
voiceless
and invisible
The glass ceiling is the floor
stepped on and stepped over
overshadowed