This Is How I Challenge Diabetes To A Fight" By Sean "Mega" Desvignes Poem by David Greene

Yo - I caught you trying to take my mother's feet.
You made Aunt Glenda's arms open up in the bathroom;
blood ran the floor like a point guard.
My mother's side of the family is literally
dying in veins.
Do you feel like a dictator
every time my Aunt Glenda has to check her sugar
before she eats a meal?
Every prick of her fingers
is a stab to the ribs for me.
Sometimes she asks me to prick her fingers for her,
and I never want to.
You can't help somebody with something that does not work.
That's like trying to sweep a floor with a prayer.
You make every prayer for my family feel like a bad joke
about black people. I caught you on Thanksgiving
kicking your feet up in a plate of sweet potatoes.
Living room filled with sinks, and anvils for ankles.
There were more medications on the table than
crumbs of cornbread, and it was a melancholy so large,
I could call it a continent.
Mom called. said she had her fourth stroke in two years -
all of a sudden, you call yourself a stroke?
That's your rapper name?
Or diabetic neuropathy,
that's what you call yourself in the jail cell
while you flex your muscles?
Mom loses vision in her left eye,
Uncle Tyrone has to amputate his toe,
My Aunt Glenda's kidneys are two deadbeat fathers married to the same woman.
Call yourself what you really are -
subtraction. Your minus sign is an empty insulin needle.
You're a punk - all you do is wait in veins.
I know where you live, and I know what you live off of.
See, you ain't nothing but sugar,
sugar ain't nothing but a chain of glucose.
You are just a chain, but you're not a ball and chain.
You ain't got the balls to chain me.
You look like the bully I had my first fight with
in the fifth grade. My punches wouldn't hurt him,
so I put him in a headlock and tried to pull the cornrows off his scalp.
That night, there were still strands of his hair still stick in my fingernails.
People get desperate when they
try to get rid of things.