Sometimes I want to fly away in a spaceship
leave for Mars on the first flight out of JFK
where my chance of respect is greater
this warrior’s heart is beat
too tired to fight, fight, fight
the devilish details derail my sanity.
What else did you expect from me?
Black
a beautiful detail of my being
I
fight to overcome a Mount Everest of problems
from
sunrise to sunset
the further I push against the ceiling
the more malleable it becomes
the harder it gets
the more I wish to fly
this hell has no bottom
maybe heaven is outside of earth
an alien race can’t do anything
my blackness hasn’t faced.
Rashaun J. Allen is a writer, entrepreneur, poet, professor, and a Fulbright recipient. A past Vermont Studio Center and Arts Letters & Numbers resident whose two poetry chapbooks: A Walk Through Brooklyn and In The Moment became Amazon Kindle Best Sellers. He has been nominated for Sundress Publication’s 2018 Best of the Net Anthology in Creative Non-Fiction and was a 2017 Steinberg Essay Contest Finalist in Fourth Genre. You can visit his website rashaunjallen.com for more of his work.