Some bright morning when this life is over I'll fly away
To that home on God's celestial shore
I'll fly away
I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away (in the morning)
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away
When the shadows of this life have gone
I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly
I'll fly away
Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I'll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I'll fly away
Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I'll fly away
...But not from the world in which you were born, in which you belonged. Without the grace afforded those who departed before you, the eventual silence after the parade died out. Not from the arms of a neighborhood full of the old and the young and your peers, all of whom knEw before they knew how to talk that this is the way one leaves the earth, with loud tears and horns and dance steps and grandmothers waving from their stoops. Not from a city which lets your brothers and cousins curl through the blocks well-worn with bygone mourners' feet, allows them to make the decision to blow you on home in their own, unofficial, spontaneous, self-sustained tradition.
No, your passing will be marked with police cars, with the kind of shit that killed the Big Chief, with new homeowners whispering into phones that people like you are out in the street at the ungodly hour of 8pm, making a damned racket. Your people in the parade will leave in handcuffs, as the police believe that smell of the sweat of those like you attracts stray bullets. They who don't understand the very blocks they invest in, with sanitized dreams of getting over, they'll go to bed satisfied, dream of the future when noise will be contained in a well-run, supa-Quarter, with no overflow and no marching, except for the daily staged parade for the tourists, timed for an hour when the threat of sunburn is least. The police will have less to worry about, won't have to consider what is gray, what is beyond the law, what just IS in this city, but can rest on laws and permit fees and some fantasy that order can be had in a city where hope is quarantined and snatched from unruly lips.
All that will be left behind will be shackles and the joyless, empty streets, and the sound of the uptight and greedy, counting their properties and dialing their cops, unafraid, now that even death has been put in its proper place.
