They made even war seem funny,
shirtless, dog tags silver bright
on their smooth black chests,
standing barefoot in that day’s dirt,
three or four in a huddle sucking
weed outside a ramshackle hooch,
jiving, chuckling in the way only sons
of distant slaves know how, wisecracking,
“Shit man, fuck these peoples,”
and how I wished I might have been
one of them in their ghetto days
more hip, wise and street smart
than any man I ever met from Yale