The story I told wasn't true.
It was, right up to the point
when I awake on the large black woman's bosom,
facing the box of kleenex.

Had you been there, you would've seen
my head bobbing back and forth, so tired,
her angry shoulder forcing me away on contact
as though my head held a series of whips lashing.

The black girls in my high school
pulled hair like mine,
in protest they said,
after the Rodney King verdict was announced.

It was hard for us to see the connection
between us and a man wrongly beaten by men,
our hair
and justice.

There was talk of revenge,
but we were all afraid
to get that stuff they put in their hair
on our hands.

But telling it different,
doesn't make it different
any more than shaving my head
would change a damn thing.