Looking Everywhere But Inside

STEPHANIE ROBERTS

Politeness is organized indifference. —Paul Valéry

we sing colourblind. we sigh at silent children stretched—dark laundry from the lindens at eve. we whisper shameful era the over of our after thought.

this is how you starve love—feeding me absence.

we talk easily (yes easily) of: serbs, irish immigrants, slavery in ancient greece, and the holocaust; our personal risk is nada, not our: police force, hometowns, courage to confess a terror of black skin in the night.

uninvited to my stolen life with a no froze like a not in my throat; i watch your party, the only party, with the only anonymity and freedom of ambiguity. we are not racist because: that black co-worker (a riot), our east indian son-in-law (so-well-spoken), the brown wife and children, a black president (see), protests remembered with sadness, sympathy, nostalgia and longing, and oprah (we love her). i love you loved you, loved you, forever forgiving often forgetting, while i get question marks for intimacy and the numerical accuracy of economics against all that tear and blood-soaked languish. at night, we admit they had it coming; just do what cops tell you. at the bottom of an old well, i look up to where you water me with the bacteria-laden swill of diplomacy.

these blacks, mexican (he’s honduran), jew,

chinese (she’s korean) . . . but white is offensive said

like the bad thing it is. easy we, accountable only to

our lone white skin and the lily-fair god that favours it.

(there is a hard-core silence a raping called level-headed shallow as compassion’s white grave.)