for V. Lamar

Word is I wasn’t born so much as skimmed off another living thing by a source of light. Let’s just say that you are light-skinned and the back of my mom’s hand is a color best worn around the eyes after a knuckle’s kiss, though this fact itself is not here to imply I was born of an act of violence, but, rather, that I was born into violence as a cultural practice and product. And I enter post-crack, post-Reagan, when the big city newspapers sell themselves with headlines about shadow-on-shadow crime like light doesn’t factor into the equation by definition, like light doesn’t have a gaze upon the world called the day. Fact of the matter is—

sad as the matter is, I can only see myself in relation to it, to the light; I can only move in reaction to movement, my ankles shackled to dogma that dogs me and us out from the moment of first appearance. In my case, that’s June 1990. Summer. Maternity ward full of shadows and from then on I can only measure love by the number of nightmares I have in a shortened span of space and simultaneity. They all always say I look like my daddy, which is to frame me a shadow in a related sense, which is to say your presence gives my own life definition, which is what they like to say on TV whenever some kid like me is extinguished too soon. Under the lights, I make due with all of this being watched and watched over and I make questions of it, too. And I ask. And you answer: not always well, often incompletely but completely honest at the same time, and that is how the concept of faith clicks for me, how I learn to perturb politics and push myself into conversations like the connotation of a word or phrase, which, too, is a form of shadow, thus a part of me, who upon a lot of light shines that I take advantage of, take care that whenever they flick the switch to turn them on—themselves, on—that they’ll be sure to see me trailing tightly behind, keeping them on their toes like they’ve kept me on mine, like you always told me they would.