"white coffins on wooden shelves"
shortly after a head remodel by jake kilroy.

a lifetime supply of black coffee entrenched in your gums
to honor the dead poets you couldn't bury in college,
white men who wrote white things about white life—
you hailing the spectrum, colorblind in the planetarium,
inviting yourself to lectures without knowing you need one,
cranking out spackle work to cover the gaps in history,
a man amid ruins scripting dialogue about tiny renovations
"all we have to fix are the fixes themselves," a cure born
out of death, the feeble antidote an assumed anecdote
because hyperbole is hysteria to those in the front row.

even those with a poetic license tucked in their wallet
haven't caught a sunrise they didn't think rose for them,
inspired by sheer blinding power and recognizing fault,
poised to take the stage by sundown and finally deliver
that slam poem about whiteness before leaving right after.

the death of irony was always homicide until it was suicide,
as if the discovery of revisionism is worse than the edits,
clutching pearls passed from bloody hand to bloody hand,
entire centuries of flame devouring the land and its people
challenging a dinner party of forever budding politicians
who can't stop asking what the ruckus is, my goodness—
if only the spitfires and sprites could make love without seed.

the truth comes like an uppercut, a welcomed operatic blow,
dizzying the man whose bookshelf comes aglow as blinding white,
so rich and commanding, it could dry a throat halfway through a cry,
a color that comes with reckoning, that marches out in numbers
that look like letters that look like symbols that look like ideas.

truly a pummeling for the larks who "just needed a change,"
for all this has been, since time was first bloodied and coddled,
is a parade disguised as a riot, a magic trick seen from all angles,
waiting for a twist, but the trap door's beneath the audience.

breathless in its inevitability, effortless in its invincibility,
it's simply a lumbering comedian dressed in a top hat and tails,
unsure if he's telling a joke, a story, a eulogy, or a confession—
all he knows, and has ever known, is that he has the floor.