Amin Drew Law

Amin Drew Law Poems

The Best Poem Of Amin Drew Law

Unsaid

when you go to jail the first thing they take from you is your shoelaces
I thought is so they can break your dignity
show their authority
It's so you don't hang yourself
they didn't tell me that
I'm here because I used to sell oxyies
20s 40s 80 milligrams
my job now is to be a barcode and listen to people that hate me
I didn't grow up poor
they call it a lower middle class
all I know is I got food stamps
and all my clothes came from a place where the price tags were written in sharpies
it is not an easy job but you're gonna make relationships
maximize profits by going to the rich neighborhoods
always easier to sell to the suburban kids
we got a saying around here
sellouts are the best buyers
you know in the state of Virginia when you're a felon
you got a petition to get your right to vote back
I've learned more about this country here than I did it Watkins Mill high school
but now that I'm a felon I can't vote
that's ironic yeah
I always thought irony was for British comedies and white girls with guitars
I used to write a lot as a kid
I kept some of the journals to remind myself my mother's son is not a wicked man
what they don't tell you is all the attics it's stuck in your head
They're not all junkies and college tweakers
they're semi-pro football players
Have no insurance
they're construction workers were herniated discs
Their mothers who taught me how to tie my shoelaces
both of my parents died of overdoses
I pay for their funerals with drug money
there goes that irony again
a poet's been coming to the prison lately
she gave me something called the uh-oh a writing prompt
let's start a poem with the sentence if the streets could talk
I'm not much of a writer anymore
every time I try I see my parents blood on my own fingertips
if the streets could talk
No
if the streets could talk
my hand shakes to the page the guards all flinch when I stand
but she tells me it's okay not to write
that listening can do just as much so I do today
she read from a collection of poems one of them said
the world's breath is what we call silence
it gets so quiet in here
you would think prison a nun governed clamor
but it is still it is windless if
the streets could talk
No
if the streetscould talk
no
if the streets could talk
I think that I got it now
if the streets could talk
I went I've seen what happens to those that do faces all bled into the asphalt
all I want to do now is carve my parents name into a tree
tellmy mother I can still make things beautiful
tell my father that he was a fireman
but I turned him into a furnace
I wrote all of this in my journal tonight
I dare not tell anyone
if I did I don't think I want my shoelaces back

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