Matthew Hall lived like most
Revolutionaries I know, smiling,
He was a true Revolutionary,
romantically in love with his people.
Only Revolutionaries approach
war & chaos,
death & destruction
with laughter & hope
for possibilities of resistance.
Matthew Hall lived like most
Revolutionaries I know
educating himself
educating his people
organizing his people
a lot of hip-hop
protests on the weekends
an honor student
in his spare time,
wearing all of the faces, smiling.
Matthew Hall died like most
Revolutionaries of our time,
on the front cover,
in primetime television,
w/ no suspects, no leads,
no reasons for death,
just reasons to live
so we could decide
if these were reasons
worth dying for.
They let niggas die faceless,
on the bottom, right corner
of page sixteen,
their prison record listed
as their lifetime achievements.
Matthew Hall died fighting for change
like Revolutionaries do,
on the front page,
on the front lawn,
in the town square.
Random.
Likely.
Unnecessarily.
Anonymously.
Matthew Hall died
like Amadou Diallo died,
like Stanton Crew died,
like homemade Rodney King videos,
in a medevil torture device.
Gruesome. Ugly. Undignified.
On the front page,
on the front lawn,
in the town square,
where most lynchings
and witch hunts occur.
Matthew Hall died
like random eighteen-year old Black men.
Dignified deaths are reserved
for eighteen-year old American soldiers
fighting for freedom and other clichés.
Matthew Hall died
from an anonymous Black man.
The same Black man that shot Malcolm,
that shot Tupac,
that shot Biggie,
that shot Jam Master Jay,
that shot councilman James Davis.
The same Black man who killed
Susan Smith’s children.
Matthew Hall died
on the front page.
He died like
Bill Cosby’s son,
like Michael Jordan’s father,
like Amiri Baraka’s daughter,
like Bob Marley with cancer
like Khallid Muhammad’s brain tumor,
like the DC sniper victim, Kenneth Bridges.
Matthew Hall died
like most Revolutionaries,
like Steve Biko died
like Walter Rodney died,
like Patrice Lumumba died,
like Thomas Sankara,
like Medgar Evers,
like King, like Kennedy, like Kennedy.
He died like Cuba, fighting
like Palestine, fighting
like Iraq, fighting
like Zimbabwe, fighting
Matthew Hall died
like most Revolutionaries do
to tell us poets who speak truth
to get back
young women and men who don’t enlist
get back
anti-war protestin’, peace junkies
get the hell back,
hip-hop political education,
get back, back
honor roll students
stay in your place,
get back, back
back in line, back in place.
The internment camps are prepared
to put us back in slavery,
but I say we die fighting.
And people will speak about us,
And people will write poems about us,
And those poems
will vibrate in the people’s minds
& vibrate in the people’s hearts,
& vibrate in the people’s words,
& vibrate in the people’s actions.
And we won’t need no emails and cell phones
to start the revolution,
just our songs, our poems, our dances,
banging on the walls and on the floors
our rhythms
kept alive in
slave spirituals,
in folk songs,
in poems,
in bebop,
in swing,
in jazz,
in blu’z,
in gospel,
in salsa,
in meringue,
in reggae,
in rock & roll,
in hip-hop,
in punk rock,
in spoken word,
a light to guide us off the plantations
like stars in night skies.
Let them kill us
as women & as men,
as Revolutionaries,
fighting, struggling,
building, loving,
smiling.
Kahlil Almustafa won 1st place in the Nuyorican Poetry Slam 2002 and is a member of the Uptown YCL Club.
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