The Universal Death of Laquan McDonald
a poem
Watching Youtube talk on parallel realities a physicist playfully spun
on stage before taking the microphone. Everyone clapped laid their hands
down as if in prayer as he unfolded the cosmos like a love note until
emptiness remained.
But the website was slow, he froze eyes heavy with equations. Bored,
I looked at other news a black teen, killed a year ago, his death on-line
it warned of disturbing images.
“To begin, I’d like to show a brief video …” the physicist’s voice floated
into the last seconds of this boy’s life a calm soundtrack
camera records bystander pointing someone runs is chased
“Did you know the Chinese use the same word for crisis as opportunity?
Remember that,” he said. In the video no sound. There's speed.
Squad cars follow Laquan, half-jogging a silhouette into police light
white beams touch him like ghostly fingerprints “It might be
better to refer to the cosmological dark matter problem," he suggests
as officers approach, "the excess acceleration problem."
“It’s a very real phenomena,” he says a cop his gun up a young man
will die strutting across the street will die bullets too fast
like thought to be seen “if you scan the sky” he looks at the officer
“with a very powerful telescope” as gunfire passes “you’ll discover
that the image is distorted” through his body.
He spins and falls, the impact “it’s as if you’re looking”
riddled Laquan reaches out “through a very big droplet of water”
shots ricochet off pavement smoke puffs
the cop kicks the knife out of his hand “this is a nice picture of the concept”
looks down, briefly walks away
another police car arrives flashing alarms reflected in blood pool
he tries, to breathe "The discovery is," he says softly,
"light is getting bent even when there’s little or no visible matter”
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