Do You Feel Me

A free verse

do you feel me and my crimes I, myself, and he counting pennies and dimes to get some bread or a quart of milk while we pass the head

I see you and your ilk strutting and strolling looking and patrolling for some fine young mamas and sisters they ignore your tongue you and your sweet band of misters we see you and feel you but you need to understand though we bleed we ain’t a one man band trying to populate a new, new clan

but you young man are trying to instigate a companionship while building a fellowship allowing these girls with their fancy twirls to hold tight to your pistol grip

Right now boy end your swanky tight ass Yankee ways and see that your feelings are carved and thrown off your face from the ceilings of love and into a sheer white lace

look to your brother and care for his mother ignore my skin and the magnitude of my rectitude rather account to me — to me - and mine and yours

You lay under a shady tree calm and happy while others sat beneath a steeple paying for motherfucking wars that sliced OUR people in half all on behalf of a rule taught in grammar school

they take OUR sisters and give them to ungodly misters they take OUR babies because they had rabies

you smile on this last, last mile knowing I cannot fight knowing I cannot recite allegiance to the law and knowing in the end I’ll have to

withdraw all complaints

so let’s end how it began you being a man and me and my brother regaling our crimes while counting pennies and dimes

_________________________ Michael Ritoch on his best days tries to be a poet/writer. He finds joy in his wife, two daughters, cats, one is really fat and the other is neurotic, reading philosophy written by old dead guys, and his friends. He writes about leadership, politics, pain, life, suffering, sometimes happiness, and whatever else comes to mind.