I’ve written only a few poems in my life. I’m decidedly not a poet. As a writer who spends a significant amount of time surrounded by other writers, most of them poets, I can say their craft is infinitely more meticulous than I can manage. We both work in imagery, of course; we both shoot for a sense of place and emotion, but while they’re trying to figure out where to break a line, I’m three paragraphs on with no idea where I’m going next.

But I wrote a few. Like this one, which I still remember: 

Christmas is coming 

It’s coming soon 

But not that soon 

It’s only June. 

It’s about a baby 

And some food and some toys 

But it’s still only June 

So I’ll have to wait.

Okay, so I was ten. I used a white Olivetti typewriter on a snack table in front of a black leather couch in our den in Great River. I used that typewriter to write letters to friends in an old neighborhood, to write a fiction story called “Flight” about two boys in a capsule zooming through the Milky Way (which they used for food, of course, saving space on cargo; if they got hungry, they just reached out and grabbed part of a Milky Way—again, ten years old). I long ago lost the story, but I remembered the poem. Interesting that I remember hating the last line because it didn’t rhyme with “toys” (I tried “noise” and “boys” but never returned to it), but now that last line is the one I believe actually works. 

The second and only other poem I wrote appeared in several journals and was excerpted in a column in the New York Times. I wrote it in response to the murder of Eric Garner and it found new energy after the death of George Floyd. It has gone under two names, “In Visible” and “White Out.”

Here it is:

“White Out” 

I drive speeds to make color disappear and cops
never pull me over. Buy me drinks
and turn me loose at three am;
they never notice. Never catch me. Blow hard
into some tube—I’ve seen it,
haven’t been asked, ever. I loiter
in malls, linger too long outside
some convenience store; play music loud
along the strip, midnight, trying to hook up
with some woman both of us hold up traffic. Officers
never suggest we move along, never notice
my brake lights are out– all they see is white
and polished chrome. Old women walk ahead
home from the grocery relaxed, worry-free. Clerks at night don’t eyeball me up aisles

I can pump then pay
I can try it on
I can move through the mob, wander unsupervised. Understand how unimaginable to question me when I ask for change without buying

a blessed thing.
I am armed with my ancestry; I am a card-carrying Caucasian. I am
unnoticeable on 95 North; this marks me as Everyman.

If someone asks me for the time, she asks “that man,” Not

“that white man.” I have never been “othered.”   

White is a given. I am never modified; I am

hardly ever described at all.

I have always been allowed to make eye contact.

I could always curse and complain.

If I say “I can’t breathe,” I am given oxygen. Just because

I am white.

I am disturbed by and proud of that poem. It is absolutely true, all of it. Sometimes privilege comes from simply by being left alone, out of eyeshot of suspicion, off everyone’s radar. I am a sixty-something white guy in America; it’s like being a Roman Citizen when they could walk the earth without fear of attack. There’s something wrong with this.

I have stood in the local convenience store talking to neighbors, drinking coffee, and random men with Civil War style beards come up and tell me when “the next meeting is” or start talking about what needs to be done to the man (“the N”) who just left who doesn’t look anything like us, whether they are Black Americans or Hispanic or Asian. These people, the talkers in front of the piles of bagged wood next to the Propane Tank Exchange Cage, are sick, and I let them know. One man in his forties held up a headline for me to see not long after the Floyd incident, and he told me what should have happened. I’m not sure where I lost my inhibitions and fears, but at some point in the last five years they evaporated. So I said, “You are one sick mofo, you know that? Get away from me.” He never approached me again. This isn’t just here. This is everywhere I’ve traveled, and it isn’t simply that we are left alone by authorities because of our whiteness; there are a growing number of people who assume we agree with them also because of our whiteness.

Many people in this nation don’t mind expressing their hatred and racism. On the one hand perhaps the blatant exposure is better—we know who they are. On the other, the violence and ignorance, fueled by leaders all the way to the top, is a powder keg and it seems more people are standing around playing with matches. They are small-minded, yes. They are insecure, definitely. They are terrified of “different,” obviously. And I have no problem telling them their heads are up their collective asses. But the worst aspect is the most difficult to change—they are suspicious of education. No one, not anyone, nobody, not one soul they know is teaching acceptance, teaching the gains of multiculturalism, teaching the facets of being human and those that are, in their minds, mean them harm. The education system needs to be overhauled starting with pre-school, yes, but that doesn’t address the ones at home teaching Junior who to hate and who to trust.

They trust me. They don’t even freaking know me, but they trust me. “He’s the quiet one at the convenience store. White guy.”

I’m a small voice, despite a weekly readership here of close to two thousand. But this subject, this inhuman behavior, is best addressed by the poets.

In that vein, I’m starting a new poem. What do you think? 

Changes are coming 

They’re coming soon 

But not too soon 

Because the small-minded, ignorant

fucks are everywhere. 

Okay, so I’m still working on it. I’m not a poet, you know.

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends” Martin Luther King, Jr.