A mantis shrimp can see four times our visible light spectrum

but to excuse your colour blindness as only human

was my mistake. Yours was knowing one fact about every animal

and nothing about surviving a world that wasn’t made for you.
You were my fair lady to course-correct into the culture,

a minister’s son set too straight, grown too narrow.

I had my work cut out, clearly:

a worm with its head cut off can regrow its entire body. 
You loved every person made in your god’s image

and that made you holier. Shame that only a fair few are chosen

while others must be bleached to whiteness. Was I

a yellowed xerox of your paper saviour or just a chink
in your defenses? I’ll never know. I’ve released myself

from my bronze man’s burden of swimming in your pool,

paring lap from laboured lap with the blade of my body

only for the water to smooth over again faster than I can
draw breath—but by all means, keep furrowing your brow.

Mistake that for the work. Pray on our conversations,

take your guilt to Sunday service, anything but actual solidarity

while the protestors march and brown bodies burn again
for the fiftieth week. Wile away your mornings tapping out

your poems, tepid verse for tepid men. Continue to make

no difference. Sting and feel stung; retreat again

to your wasps’ nest. Bees at least will die after the first jab.
Another animal fact: I made you more than bland.

I gave you legitimacy. For years you monopolised

my patience for the pedestrian until last summer my god,

iris-dark, knotted as mangroves’ roots, messier than
the arc of the moral universe spoke to me

in words even you could understand:

No more pearls before swine.

You have given this clown enough of your time.
So if you want forgiveness, I am not your man.

Possibly I never was one. Go grovel to your god instead

who counts you among his precious children

and me among the animals.