Ten Minute Poems

I don't normally have a hard time writing, but knowing I have to share a piece is paralyzing. The best way I've found to get around this is to give myself 5 or 10 minutes to write something, anything, and then put it away. Finished. What follows is a timed write from Zdiar.

untitled

"It is different," the man said, "It is different
because they are like animals." I had been told
to listen politely. My eyes remained attentive;
my head nodded; my mouth smiled as I recoiled inside,
began to wonder how this man, a perfectly decent man,
could hold a hatred so strong it decomposed into disdain,
into a knowing of the Other's inferiority, into a disregard
that can't understand another's failure to disregard.
But it was taught, of course, as all racism is taught:
We teach it in the way we speak to one another
and the way we don't. We teach it with our eyes
with the attitudinal shift just visible if you look for it.
And we perpetuate it in our not bothering to understand.
It's a kind of laziness, but we pay for it,
because hatred isn't easy. Like love, it takes us time to justify...
and something else a little nobler. We work for our hatred,
in an attempt, maybe, to feel better about ourselves,
all the while certain that our hatred doesn't count as such.

········
The story is, unfortunately, true. And what's horrible is that this person (we'll call him J) wasn't even angry. He was earnestly trying to explain to me why his racism wasn't racism, why it couldn't be compared to racism between whites and non-whites in, say, the United States. And once J said that, I became a shell — I was outwardly engaged, even to my eyes, because I was taught how to do that. But a part of me caved in, and I immediately began to compose this poem.