Ontology
When someone yells, “Hey, white guy!”
I turn around.
When someone yells, “Hey, black guy!”
I do not turn around.
When someone yells my name,
I turn around.
When someone yells something that is not my name,
I do not turn around,
unless the name they yell is close to mine,
like Andrew or Aaron. But if someone yells
Mark, or Nelson, I do not turn around,
although Nelson is a cool name
so I would probably turn around
to see who was named Nelson.
When I stand in a room
I am the absence of room.
I possess that space, the room
goes around me, it does not
pass through me. I am solid.
When someone yells, “Hey white guy!”
I turn around
but no one’s ever yelled
“Hey white guy!” in my presence
so I’ve never turned around
to that. Very few people
yell out to me. Everyone
goes around me—I’ve never been
passed through,
run through,
walked through unseen
like a ghost.
I’ve been run into,
but I am solid.
If someone were to yell,
“Hey white guy!”
I would turn around.
I would not be poised to fight
because I am solid.
I have friends who have heard
“Hey black girl!” “Hey Asian!”
and things more descriptive
and damaging. I don’t know
if they turn around.
But I know that sometimes we
are not solid and things pass through
and come out the other side
bloody and flattened like a civil war shell
and we are all standing
in a room and all the light is bouncing off us
because we are terribly, terribly
solid and nothing passes through us
except those things that have
no substance, no matter.
A contradiction. If someone yelled
“Hey white guy!” to me maybe
I would punch them in the nose
because I am solid and a poet
and no one ever yells “Hey Poet!”
and I am tired of everything
bumping into me
and going around me
and being solid.
My friends, let us fill the room
until we are the room
and nothing can pass us
or go around us and no one
can yell anything about us
because we are the room
and we are solid.
***
Read more of Adam Hughes’s poetry.
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Photo by Jordi Carrasco /Flickr
Profound without being pretentious.
Very good poetry! This would be a powerful spoken-word poem.