American Skin

in the beginning, there was skin.

permanent tans prescribed to nomads basking after an afternoon hunt and pale cave dwellers hunched in a fire-lit french forest. back when melanin was a raincoat, we regularly saw the slick-red-flesh that boils underneath this shell that we cringe to draw blood through.

in the beginning black was a moonless night, and tribesmen wore skin of walrus while trekking through some 14 shades of white, and race was a contest between barefoot warrior’s once but then there was babel.

and tongue clicks from purple lips sounded like gunpowder mortars.

bright eyed ghost men offered drunk juice and believed the earth could be traded for stones.

in a place where war starts with a dance and meals had half there weight offered to an idea there was first contact with a people of mirrors and coins and serfs.

but once bipeds were a species and aryans were born in iran once.

israelites were arabs long before jesus was a withdrawn rockstar. back when jews praised jah with the blood red corpse of a canaanite, all humanity knew that skin was just the last shield between a sword and intestines and death.

but we don’t see flesh in america.

war is a tv show and blood’s the color of candy apple lollypops and skin is a language. tone is a checkbox. shade ain’t a treelined summertime street in america.

and with that,

our shells have grown thick

our eyes have dulled

and monochromatic american skin has the weight of a middle-aged armor.

much too heavy to dance in. much too ugly to stare at. all looking like mirrors and Fear.

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Inspired by a great many thing, both of reality and of meditation. One was a conversation I had in bed with my girlfriend haley. We marveled for a second at the thought of all the organs and flesh just millimeters underneath us and how easy it was to forget that there is anything underneight what we see every day. A day or so afterwords I remember looking my feet in the bathroom on a sleepless night. For some reason my veins were full and fat on my legs and showed green through my skin. It was the first time I notice my shade, that I was not that dark really, not high yellow but certainly on the orangier side of almost brown. It was the first time I can remember identifying my own skin as something other then black.