I shaved my head last week,
bald, chrome
dome and found some
hair food made with olive oil,
lanolin, and some other shit.

When I put it on, the smell took me
back to when I was nine years old
and my best friend Marquise Wilder--
it smelled like him, like his
brothers Martez, Antoine and I can't remember
the others names. His mother's
name was Cookie.

I walked black streets back then,
unafraid, the same streets
I now drive in Decatur, Illinois
going 45 in a 30, head hunched down,
praying to God I don't hit a stoplight.

Back then the world was the same
but I was different. I was a minority
in a world of a minor majority
and Marquise once stepped up for me
in front of the whole school
when an asshole named Keon threw
a ball at me so hard in a kickball
game that it knocked my feet out
from under me and I hit the ground
hard as the broken pride of handing
over foodstamps with a line of long
white people behind you.

Marquise knew that kind of hard.

And I'd go to stay with him
on the south side, a piece of bird shit
in the night, an easy target
I was short, skinny, blonde, and white.

One time I took a plastic Thundercats
play tent to Marquise's house.
That night was the first time
I was ever called Honky,
Whitey, Cracker,
White Shrimp, White Devil
I'm sure there were more
but one was enough.

I won't pretend that a few mean names
equals centuries of enslavement,
rape, murder, or whatever else
is belng sold as the sins of
the white man today.
But I'll tell you this:
No nine year old kid deserves
that kind of pain.

So when I say "sup"
to the black dude at Target
with his diamond earrings
and his $200 sneakers
and he snubs me, scowls
at me like I raped his mother
and his sister and sent him
on a raft down the mighty Mississip;
I want to smack his face
and say, "Look, you asshole--
my hair smells the same as yours."