The Color Purple (Round 2)

Let’s workshop this poem about a man whose troubled background gives off a stench that the elite academics he finds himself around cannot stand (especially since he has the skin-color of an oppressor)

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The Color Purple

Born and raised too poor for any grace
in the mingling dance of literate society 
(yet too white for token dispensations),
his grad-school program expected him 
to network among scarved “liberals” full
of band-practice swim-meet memories—

white-kind revolted by that reek of a past
they figured of like Disneyland privilege:
a depression hump locked in by seven;
CPS eyes of hunger-insomnia purpled, 
like pay-by-the-week drywall from wine
jugs flung, by the Johns of a crack mom.

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This piece is unpublished