A black battlement of pines hides Holman from the

big-rig yeomen on the highway.

Barbwire stockades. Sniper turrets. Cottonfields.

Mechanized ghost of Fort Mims.

Down that green river, like a wire, like a nerve, like a vein,

sacred names crawl through the mist.

Alabama. Tallapoosa. Burning plantation walls of

the little man who called that sweet land his.

I wasn't ready.

I wasn't even there.

Swamp-slick trailers flank the reconstructed fort,

waiting on a 400-year dream.

Stars and stripes rotted to strips. The faded slavers’ cross.

King Trump's banner.

I hope the little man feels earth shake the day the flags drop,

the walls come tumbling down.

Downriver, the cotton’s rotting in the fields. They’re hollering.

No prisons, no plantations in a Free Alabama!

I wasn't ready.

I wasn't even there.

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

Through wild moonlight, across MLK, up to

the city lockup's brutal bulk,

rebel songs for debtors, indocumentados,

the sweating streets, the shuttered hoodoo shop.

Durag-crowned, dashiki-draped, black-masked,

cowboy-booted in Troy Davis Park,

indivisible under sweeping choppers, SWAT tanks,

the burnt matchbook of faceless cops.

I wasn’t ready.

I wasn’t even there.

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

O, please, make us fit to be

Outlaws!

I’ve been held by

the hazy skylines

of downtown

Tuskegee,

Anniston,

Birmingham.

I've bowed my head in the streets

where they stood strong.

I’ve looked up into

their ageless faces,

gazing off yonder

into the thickets and the pines,

and I believe

what they said.

The old-time

inscriptions read:

We fought the law, and we won!

We fought the law, and we won!

We fought the law, and we won!

We fought the law, and we won!