Dec 6th. 2024

My name is Dvonte, or SauceThaPoet. This poem is from the perspective of black minorities in America. Many of my poems deal with subjects relating to equality, whether racial, gender, sexuality, etc. I try to make a change in at least one person or teach at least one person something every time I perform.

Dvonte: Am I Understood 

Waking up where you can move bricks but never house
Where niggas baby mommas don’t even be they spouses 
Walking down the street and be quieter than two mouses
Hear fireworks go off and change the color of your trousers
Can’t read, can’t write, but can turn around a dollar
Hustle all your life but can never be a baller
Hold that gun to your face and pull the trigger if you holler
Where you can get jumped just cause the color of your collar
Not the best life but it’s what we had to deal with
None of this kept us from them academic field trips
I read a dictionary while I wrote just so you could feel this
Speak proper with the lighter shades so they don’t think I’m stealin
Hands up on the counter while I’m purchasing goods
I gotta raise my voice in quiet places just to be understood 
They say they get how we feeling but really they never could
They see us wronged by the system and say we misunderstood
Imagine this you see your big bro on the news
For pushin paraphernalia some shit that he never used
You can’t recall a single time he even sipped on some booze
And now he walking down a long road that he didn’t choose
But that don’t matter
He’ll rot in jail get madder than a hatter
He ain’t get 3 strikes he ain’t a baseball batter
Now take both hands, put them behind your back, lock em together
Then try and throw a punch without them being untethered 
“STOP RESISTING”
*boom boom*
Now that’s much better
You see it’s harder to fight if you ain’t spreading your feathers
Take a flight
Know some crackers that get higher than a kite
But they ain’t stripped of their one chance to live a normal life
They don’t get battered and beaten because the cuffs too tight
They don’t gotta protest and chant just for basic human rights
But that’s life, we gotta play the hands that were dealt
The hands wrapped in chains the hands that never got held
They hold us under warm water and dare us to melt
Then hop in a pool and say they feel what we felt
100 years
You telling me I couldn’t go to school here
Forget spiders that gold badge was really all our true fears
We begging for mercy but they never gave two cares
We been drained for so long that we can’t even produce new tears
And if we cry em a river they burn the bridge and build some new stairs
Y’all remember George?
Laying on the floor
“I can’t breath” “I can’t breath”
He said it nine times more
No one even cared
They just sit and stare
While the cops kill a man cause his skin don’t match theirs
What about Ryan
Flying to the sky in
Just the blink of an eye because a cop was feeling tired
You see what I mean 
None of this is right
But we looked at like savages if we put up a fight
That’s all I had to do 
That’s all I had to say
I just want equality at the end of the day