They made even the 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 ancestral slaves know how, wisecracking,
“Shit man, fuck them 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