I tell the keeper I don’t know
What he or any white man means
When he says privacy
Especially
In the phrase In the privacy
Of one’s own home / I understand
he thinks he means a kind of
Militarized aloneness
If he would listen I would ask him whether
The power / To enforce alone-
ness and aloneness
can exist together
Instead I tell him where I’m from we
Have no such con-
cept if he thinks I am / Too wise
he won’t speak honestly
And so I talk the way the men
He says are men like me
Talk in the books he reads to me
I understand
Those books are not supposed to make me wise
And yet I think perhaps
They show me what he means
By privacy // Perhaps
by privacy he means / This
certainty he has that
The weapons he has made
Will not be used against him.
From: http://omniverse.us/poetry-shane-mccrae/
Date: 2016
By: Shane McCrae (1975- )