I’ll let the reader decide what, exactly, my mindset was when I wrote this free verse masterpiece.

My Brown Skin by Hakim Kangsworth, Formerly Known as Larsen Halleck

The solar body rises and the flesh body stirs
Shaking off leeting nocturnal bacchanals, labor begins
Slaving, slaving, slaving, for aloof landlords
The alabaster face of atrocity
Denigrating and mocking and slurring yet feasting upon my brown skin
All our myriad shades of beautiful brown, trampled upon by marble feet of oppression
We drive the convoys that carry your totems of esteem, and dredge the cesspits of modernity
Food springs forth from our hands, and waste is carried by those same hands
Hands that have only done good, are incapable of committing violence
Spat upon by illegitimate tyrannies, has always been my brown skin
White skin has no business being here, white skin has no business being there
This land and that land and all lands belong to the indigenous ones
Indigenous peoples around the world, eternally bonded together
By our brown skin
Whiteness belongs absolutely nowhere, springing forth to slay and ravage
The epitome…of illegitimacy
Everything good that you claim to create, was made by us
The golden-brown just rightness of celestial cookery
A celestial mandate that is real unlike yours
We take the worst abuses over six centuries
But we remain strong
Beloved parents from the four corners of the world
Laboring under this land of plenty
To give me the privilege of writing this verse
Hands callused and muscle heaving
Digging and planting and routing and hammering
To give their children a better life
All of them straining, all of us hoping
To take our first step—together
All together laboring towards that collective dream
Of a world where we are all bonded
By our glorious brown skin