Ode to My Friend with a Swastika on His Forehead

Justin Rovillos Monson

source: skrytebane/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

He dons a helmet of ink — Hated Breed, War 
Eagles, Nazi heiroglyphs — & laughs with his red beard. 
At a protest or in the city streets on any day 
he would certainly be booed & heckled & still he says 
No, man, they're a part of me now, when I ask if he'd take 
it all back given the chance, if he'd watch the prison— 
made soot flow back up into the mini-motor rig 
feel the blood splash back into his bald skull.
We're just way more militant than the other 
groups — Vice Lords, Gs, Crips, Bloods, Kings, Counts, Cobras — can't change
the history he says. I like to watch from my doorway 
when Will & Big Mike, who are dark enough that the homies 
call them Black & Blue, kick it tough with Red 
his ink on show & it's just another day 
talkin' their shit about the new Black Ink Crew 
Jeezy's hardest album & the toxic river 
rolling heavy under their hometown. 

If a race war pops off, we all know what it is 
get down or stay out the way, but in peacetime the yard 
is calm. The savages inside us sit 
& jerk off & learn to pray to any god willing 
to listen. They yell to one another from their jungle caves 
asking if they peeped homegirl on channel thirty-two 
or wondering what might be for breakfast.

Justin Rovillos Monson is a poet and writer currently serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Follow his work on Instagram at @justinthepoet.