To My People:

Whatever you did

to hurt me or yourself or something, someone else,

I’m sure we’d find at the bottom

of the stacks of paper

written with the reasons you are bad,

signed in your own inky penance

or in someone else’s curled fishing line 

cast to catch breaks without giving any

a page with the formula on how to belong,

interchangeable for the equation on

how to keep yourself safe.

Can you keep this square root in mind

for me, too? 

At least, let’s take out pencils

to sign off on paper slips of transgressions

and sketch out everything we believe,

then erase everything

we can’t kind somewhere

in our own humanity