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So there's a boy walking down 6th Street
His hands and his pace don't match his quick feet
Frequently shattering his shins from the instinct
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| Phillip Lentsch - Class of 2018 |
Of sliding down slippery wet winter concrete
His eyes flash to the drums in his ears
Boppin’ to a dope beat
His mind reminiscent
Of a fleet-footed dream
In the sweaty summer heat
He shifts his gaze
And tells himself to keep moving
He doesn't have time to swim in his fantasies
He's just tryna help his momma make ends meet.
This is the story of the boy that lost his way
This is the story of monumental potential
That fell through like quicksand
Last year
There was a sexual assault not too far from where I lived
Three suspects were shortly taken into custody in the days thereafter
Following in the wake of empty screams
And nightmarish PTSD
One of the boys charged was only 16
The police couldn't even disclose his name in the press release
Because he hasn't seen enough of this world
To be considered free
I couldn't imagine spending my 16th birthday in a prison cell
What it must feel like to be admitted behind bars
But not to R-rated movies
Let me be clear
I hold no sympathy for rapists
That girl was a lilac stomped into the ground by heartless misogyny
Her words will never be heard
I'm just trying to infer
What made young men on the streets so cruel?
What made them become fiends in the night?
To reach the point where their faith couldn't be translated into reality
The only sign of God they were seeing
Was when the cops snatched the Euphrates from their friends' throats
The crime beat marches on endlessly
Perpetuated by racist swagger
And gentrified shanty towns ridden with crack pipes
That chain men to the asphalt
I have no idea what it's like
To grow up in poverty
I checked my privilege a long time ago
It is the blank slate
That gives and takes
No one can help where they come from
No one is born a racist
No one is born a rapist
No one wishes to recognized by a mugshot
Yet too often
We equate the ghetto with gunshots
Like there aren't families in the hood
Just tryna to raise good-intentioned boys and girls
If you grew up
Falling asleep to the sound of police sirens
And batons beating against your skin
Do you think you'd be the same?
Do you think you’d stay sane?
The boy on 6th Street
Had bubbly ballerina feet
Beautiful
Brilliantly brutal
But softer than lunch meat
Hopes to one day slice ciphers and similes like orange rinds
And unlock the gold mines of his effervescent mind
His fate is not the truth
Merely a sign of the times
The only light he sees
At the end of the tunnel is blue
As his future melts away like fondue
Prison bars and chains
A modern-day voodoo
And those moments of genius that we'll never be privy too
How they'd be on the tip of his tongue
But never the tip of his pen
How the fire he could have lashed
Was muffled by uniformed men
Instead
All we see
Is slanged-out slander
And a hoodrat fiend with an M16
A boy on his way to school
One wrong turn takes him to the penitentiary
One wrong turn in the suburbs
Just takes you to a cul-de-sac
The East and West End
Signify the urban divide
Of a concrete jungle gentrified
It splits down 6th Street
The subconscious soliloquy
Of a dichotomous geography
Like Jekyll and Hyde
But the streets that carry
The footsteps of Ali
Sizzle and still stay bona fide
In the hood
There’s still life to find
Springtime flowers growing through the urban ambiance
The sun shining just as bright
On the kids spittin’ the illest verses you've ever heard
Smooth as Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird
I just hope
They never change to what society prefers
That they never lose the fire in their throats
To speak their word
Phillip Lentsch, of Louisville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar studying political science and communication.