Music: Justin Brown/Jermaine Paul/Georgia Anne Muldrow/Meshell Ndegeocello/Aja Monet
Lyrics: Aja Monet
When the police arrived
Factories coughing up all my relatives
Tail lights glowing
We've been gambling medicine bags and tobacco offerings
Merry-go-round vocabulary
News reports from the altars of the ancestors
Snarling, borrowing, scorching under the heart rib of progress
Okay
In the furnace of feelings
Each morning, I scroll the commodification of my story
And weep into a cup of tea
My shadow banned
There's power in the unseen
We're divided by our values
I threw the baby out with the bathwater
Crayola blues
Blood-flowered
Rusted panty liner
Wax of poetics on paper
The flesh can sing too
Okay
One by one
I bow to pass selves and let them be wrong about me
The coastline gibbering about names we did not declare at the border
The honest hum of bathroom mirrors
You are as virtuous as your ear
Sonorous stanzas
Forgive me
I do not follow my own advice
I survey for answers I already know
And question friends who do not know me
Idle with time
Languishing in the laundry room
My dresses
Cartwheeling the drier
Tease my body to dance
Refresh the page
Take inventory self
I lose faith
Okay
And sometimes
I wonder my purpose
Sometimes
I participate in my demise
I attend the funeral
Walk the chalk line
Sometimes I slur my words
I drink until I do not remember
The yelling daughter left alone
I throw back bitter shots of life
To the living lecturer in my head
Pity the fool
On a soapbox
With a mouthful of soapsuds
Okay
Okay
Okay
And let them be wrong about me
Okay
Okay
Okay