The badges you wear were betrayed the very instant you flashed your sights on me.

You had nothing good in mind from the start.

I was doomed from the beginning.

By the time the brutality started,

The senselessness of it all kept my body numb to the assault.

“What did I do,” I keep asking, as

Your brutal blows, strongholds and punches bend my body into painful pretzels.

While y’all’ve got me firmly pressed against the pavement, y’all yell:

“Get on the ground.”

Pressed on the ground, I say disarmingly:

“You guys are really doing a lot right now.”

My calmness stands out against all your unwavering aggressions.

Yet, you continue to play the same game: “Get on the ground.”

Beneath the ground there is only hell, and yet

My face pressed against the gravel by your hooves feels like hell, right here, right now.

‘Watching the world wake up from history.’

As if wielding your fists and batons, tasers and bullets don’t threaten me enough,

There are five of you, and

Each of you is massive.

Each of you …highly trained, experienced, and tremendously pumped up.

I am a little weasel sized up against any one of you, and

You are a mob of five.

Too weak to lift my own self, two officers hoisted me up by my limp arms, blood streaming from my head and outta ev’ry orifice, voice too weak to shout. I’m beaten badly, and yet you continue to brutalise me.

Manhandled.

I stumble up, firmly in your grasp, and all I do is plead, which gave enough time for another officer to grab a baton.

He quickly came back with the baton, screaming “give us your hands,” while the two officers still restrained me by these very same hands.

You continually scream “Stop resisting,” while

At least two if not three of you all strangling some part of my body.

The agony is immense.

You’re a pack on the hunt.

You chase me down, and

Torture and kick me more feverishly for running away.

I am in a battle for my life, you…

You are in a battle for your manhood.

“Bruh, you say, and words like these are the same words used to connect us to one another.

The words you use to abuse me could be endearing in another context.

Yet you have the nerve to call me “bruh,” and beat your brother to death.

‘I was alive and I waited, waited’

Waited for your humanity to show up,

Waited for justice to be served to me equally.

‘I was alive and I waited, waited,’ waited three days in the hospital…and

Neither justice nor your humanity ever showed up.