Grateful
by Keenan Wilson
Keenan Wilson is a student at 826michigan.
I haven’t even begun to spill my life story onto these pages.
And people tell me, “I know how hard it must’ve been.”
And I’m asking myself,
How?
Because you heard a couple of my poems?
My mother always told me:
“Be grateful for what you got,
some people got it rougher than you.”
And I couldn’t see how when the lights
and heat didn’t work.
We had to walk to the dinner table with a candle,
and two blankets on just to keep warm.
We ate peanut butter some nights so we wouldn’t go to bed hungry.
We even learned to time the gunshots ’cause they happened so much
9:17, 11:23, 8:06, 1:45 in the morning every night,
ducking below window sills.
I live between danger and a stop sign,
learned the streets backward I was outside so much,
better yet,
learned the streets better than the back of my own hand,
better yet,
learned the streets better than the back of my father’s head
’cause that’s all I ever saw.
Once, when I was nine,
I went with my cousin C.J.
to go jump this kid ’cause he stole my bike.
and a stray drive-by bullet missed my chest by six inches.
I saw that gunshot every time I batted my eyes,
during the weeks my mother kept me in the house after my Divine Intervention.
And as I lie in my room,
and listen to the stories rotate around the neighborhood blocks like squad cars:
Li’l Jerry, two brothers, one younger sister
had to sleep on cardboard boxes in the garage at the end of my alley
’cause their mother was a crack fiend.
Ms. Lane around the corner had three sons,
all of them sold drugs,
none of them ever saw age nineteen.
The youngest was killed two months before his nineteenth birthday.
And you wonder why I say, “It’s a curse to be stuck here forever.”
School never meant nothing to me,
’cause everybody from Finkel to PA was on welfare.
And property tax was so low,
teachers, fresh from college,
would come work at my school for three months,
then go get a job somewhere in the suburbs
so that they could put on their resumés
that: “I worked in the inner city.” Like they were in the trenches of war.
And you’d think we didn’t know what was happening,
when we had four different third-grade teachers.
Analyze my life,
and tell me how many opportunities I had to break down stereotypes.
My hood was filled with kings and queens,
who evolved into some peasants,
over a time span of five hundred years.
My ancestry has been stripped away from me,
replaced with guns and drugs,
thugs and crack heads,
misdemeanors, felonies, and jail bars.
But my mother always told me:
“Be grateful for what you got,
some people got it rougher than you.”
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