Winter was once cold

A shield, a force field

A protector from rough Chicago summers

Where bullets find bodies

Now crimson ❄️ is this season

Because cold ❤️ ♥️ 💜 have steel gods

Piercing like ⚡️coursing through veins

We lost another student on the first day

The new year starts with murder

His college tuition already paid

I wonder who will get it now

His locker open, weeping hallways scream

There is no solace in Chicago

Taxes and crime rise

Young bodies fall like frigid temperatures

There’s so much good here, overshadowed

There so much hood here, mind baffled

An empty seat is amongst his advisory

A memorial entombed, artic classmates

They don’t think of school they think life

Will I live long enough in a gentrified city

That calculated my death in the 3rd grade

He never got to be a Toy-r-Us kid

Just a statistic, a generational curse

A lost tribe of colonized residuals

I’d pray but we know in Chicago

If winter is hot

Summer will be hell

Hope is deferred here

Winter is a blur

Sleep on Puma, find warmth in eternity