Thank you…

For your bravery.

For calming courage in crisis.

For your revolt.

For your rebel.

For your community, your collective leadership, your lived resistance.

For your ‘fuck this shit.’

For your curfews.

For your token chief,

And his military police– mentored by Mossad.

For your resistance— guided by Gaza.

For your well of humanity:

Digging deep in revolutionary reservoirs.

For that camel:

Back breaking under sunny Saturday straws.

For your Molotov.

For fiery Florissant;

Flaming from Ferguson

To a ghetto near you.

For your struggle:

An indelible mark on our collective memory of Rights inalienable.

Free speech, assemble in peace, redress of grief.

For challenging our direction and intersection.

Our commitment and analysis,

Our vision of the possible,

Our tear ducts.

For your booing:

Of Reverends:

And “New” Panthers,

And National Associations,

And homegrown hip hop heroes-turned-Hollywood.

For making it so hard for the Old Guard.

For challenging Jesus himself to grab goggles and a gas mask,

And get his ass to Canfield.

For #handsup.

DON’T SHOOT!

For new friends & future fighters.

Connected rebel guards across the country.

For nightly resistance.

For midnight conversations about reclaiming the QuikTrip,

And all night journeys down downtown to the Department.

For we young, we strong, we marching all night long.

For uncivil disobedience.

For laughter;

Balming burned hands and all gold megaphones.

For cyphers: our artistic counterinsurgency tactic.

For new chants and songs:

Crowdsourced from hearts

To mouths to hands raised.

For literal and figurative raids

On our safest spaces.

For the Love:

That Deep, requited, crazy, unwavering, strong, uninhibited, full, foolish

Real LOVE.

 

For allowing me to bear Witness

To a rebellion; unbounded radical energy.

To 5 men doing all they could to hold back a man

With the strength of 6;

Pores pierced with pepper,

Pleading with the police

To kill him:

As he would rather die

Than live another minute

In the world as it is.

To mighty minds wrestling with the moment.

To quarreling clergy Councils calling on Christ.

To “Movement Veterans” vying for police attention, Marshalling honorable mentions, fencing youth in the trenches.

To white allies and anarchists; building bonds, burning buildings, and throwing bricks.  Respectively, of course.

To tears streaming down the face of a woman being interviewed

And down the face of the woman interviewing her.

 

To a country at war with the stepchildren it never wanted or loved.

To the oft-deceptive 24 hour perspective of the pundits: looting the truth, rioting against our narrative.

 

To powerful political analysis by them “young thugs”:

Faces obscured by t-shirts and TV.

Out all night exercising their human right.

Telling me that they’d “fight that man” until they

“Indict that man.”

 

To a “show me” state living up to its name.

To people who couldn’t be closer to me if they had my last name.

WE SEE YOU.

Your resistance is documented. You’re a chapter in this fucked up American anthology.

WE FEEL YOU.

You are liberators:

With every tank,

Every military move they make…

Chains break.

WE HEAR YOU.

We know bout it

Because we all live in a “North County.”

We will not soon un-see you

And for the past few weeks,

Every armchair revolutionary

Wanted to be you.

I love you.

We love you.

Bravo Ferguson. Fight on.

Encore. Encore!!

The world is ours.