Maskless
Miles Hodges
This is the beginning of the poem.
My brother, one time he told me that
the coolest kid in the room
actually doesn’t have any friends.
And I’ve really been thinking about that ever since.

Everybody knows
you can’t trust a pretty boy with light skin…
Everybody knows
you can’t trust a pretty boy with light skin.
Lies at the brim,
of his smile.
Cheeks safety-pinned
to the edge by,
by a pile of regrets.
Everybody knows
you can’t trust a pretty boy with light skin.
Lies at the brim of his smile,
lined by 400 years of white sin,
got the plight of my father’s folk
looking real, real grim.
Seems like all my black friends are broke,
but I’m punching in a pin.
Less melanin, more wins,
more accepted at bank ATMs.
Cheek pinned to the edge by a pile of regrets.
Flesh, can indeed be to glistened.
Too golden to be honest.
His reeks of musicians,
of sad violinists,
of kush smoke,
of couldda-beens and shouldda-beens
I wonder
how do you trust a man whose eyes
can go from green to gone,
in a single night?
Check his mask.
He wears it well.
Check his brash.
His brains and his face get girls,
but his veins don’t listen,
they skip curfew,
no longer young and dumb,
he is smart and fake,
his days are long,
but his nights are great.
There are riots.
Riots like slum,
like the projects after Malcolm’s
death in his chest,
but on the outside he’s cool.
He’s all blunts.
He’s all booze.
He’s all ruins…
A mural of the ones.
He’s a stomach,
he’s Sunday night dinner
without Grandpa to fill the table.
He knows, that a father
and his oldest son will forever
be lynched together by the lip,
but sometimes he comes home and he’s lonely.
This is the end of the poem.
He turns 21 in a couple of months.
But he’s had a fake ID
since he was 14
and that’s sort of whatever.
He wrote his will this year.
Sometimes he does things,
because he knows that tomorrow,
he will choose to forget them.
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2013, titled "Maskless", by artist "Miles Hodges".