If Looks Could Kill:
 

My sisters and brothers in the street would be serial killers, fettered to a cold self - hatred, generation after generation.  Their eyes blank with a life time of resentment and frustration.  Mirroring the look I used to wear, existing with no vision, no purpose or dignity and aiming their deadly frowns at random targets.  I too had killed with my eyes, not knowing my destiny, intimately understanding my fate, until I chose to look another way.
 

If Looks Could Kill:
 

Black men and women would be donning a look absent of defeat and fear,
one that does not smother self-determination.  I can see the currents of rage beneath layers of beaten skin, protruding like festering sores that rise forth from the hell fire of blackened thoughts.  I can see the sacrificial images of slaves deep in their contorted expressions, as people, events and the world passes them by.  While never noticing the culmination of fatal wounds.  Sisters and brothers go on giving looks that permanently scar.
 

If Looks Could Kill:

My sisters and brothers, refugees from the "American Dream" would stare intensely into that dream...a dream that crushes, lynches and imprisons those born without ivory casting.  They would destroy that dream with a single glance as our hearts wonder;  "How do we relieve ourselves of a life tattooed with blood?  How do we cope with a nightmarish reality that forfeits our identity, our very existence?"  I see the sable eyes of my sisters and brothers dark and toxic shadows moving dangerously to the surface.  If our souls are to survive, then we must dream , a new dream and if our souls are to survive, then we must look with a new look, at ourselves, at one another and at the world.

If Looks Could Kill

I am buried time and time again when I see my sisters and brothers massacred by the ignorance of black hands, mercilessly slain in a cycle of black violence.  They are cruelly disfigured by scornful looks which brings an emotional famine to our once fertile fields, causing us to starve in a time of plenty.  Where love is uprooted by mistrust making us grow farther and farther apart.

I ask,  "Where do we go when we are pinned in by our own sins? Where do we look for the season of change and where do we find the river that will baptize from our faces the looks that hold us captive?"
 

If Looks Could Kill:

My sisters and brothers would give their voices, their lives...giving and giving.  Taking a stand against the "looks" that seek to bar us from human rights, freedom, unity and liberation.  So let us all shout a battle cry that will reach an octave capable of shattering our long sleep and our hate filled stares.  Let us hurl with force a look of righteous indignation into the walls of a racist and oppressive Jericho....and let us all remember.........
                                IF LOOKS COULD KILL
                                IF LOOKS COULD KILL
                                IF LOOKS COULD KILL
                                IF LOOKS COULD KILL

Visit the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty:
 http://www.ccadp.org