Vampires in the Shadows

A Poetic Journey Through Ryan Coogler's Sinners (Part 3)

Last week, I lingered with Smoke’s death scene, listening for how love can outlast mortality, how absence can still be a form of presence, and how grief can bend itself into reunion.

For those just joining, this is part three of a five-week collaboration with Robert Monson—a brilliant writer and Black theopoeticist. Together we are tracing Ryan Coogler’s Sinners through poetry, exchanging verses as a kind of dialogue. Each piece answers the film and answers one another, listening for what the images conceal and what they reveal.

Robert opened the series with the poem Call me Delta Slim, a moving meditation on survival’s quiet witnesses. I followed with I Met Her At the Juke Joint, a love poem imagined in the heat, rhythm, and tenderness of that night.

I then turned to Smoke’s final moments with the poem The Last Smoke, a meditation on passing, reunion, and inherited rage. Robert responded with you can hold her once you put that cigarette out, a poem about release and tenderness, calling Smoke back to himself, back to rest, and back to love.

This week, we arrive at the “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene, a moment filled with energy, tension, vibrant music, and dancing. Here, music pulses through bodies and hearts, carrying both joy and dissonance. The scene asks us to reckon with the way rhythm can be borrowed, bent, or stripped, and how—even in the face of cultural appropriation—empathy, recognition, and connection can emerge.

The dance floor is a space where discipline, spontaneity, and communal rhythm converge, where liberation and belonging unfold together.

In this piece, I turn my ear to that living tension.

What does it mean to move with music that is both ours and not ours?

To claim joy and freedom in the act of breaking, hand in hand, alongside others?

What follows is my attempt to trace that energy, to hear the fractures and recoveries in the midst of the cypher, to map the rhythms, the silences, and the shared awakenings into my own origin story in the heart of New York City.

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Vampires in the Shadows

as i stood among my boys \ us staring at him breaking in the middle of our back-to-school dance \ i knew soon enough it would be my turn to break too \ yes there was hesitation \ storm clouds gathering in my teenage chest \ but i knew i would step forward into the cypher anyway \ arms pumping \ pistons firing \ legs carving through the musty air \ hips cutting like lightning in the midnight sky \ knees orbiting until the room fell still \ my black body frozen \ prayer hands before the gospel hymn \ heaven’s gates cracking open \ light spilling like molten fire across the gymnasium floor \ it wasn’t only the fact that he was white \ though high school was the first time i sat in class with white boys \ once i learned they consume our culture \ wear our clothes \ sing our songs \ dance to our music like rivers drawn to the sea \ i wondered what the fuss was anyway \ and even though one white boy once questioned the blackness beneath my caramel caribbean skin \ after the sting i realized he was just as confused as i was \ his parents from ireland \ his ginger hair out of place among the blonds and browns \ no different than my green eyes searching the black kids’ table in the cafeteria \ and some part of me knew he understood the weight of being different from those already marked as different \ so when Remmick entered the cypher again \ we stared not only because his white skin glowed amongst our black shadows \ but because it felt like something in the air had shifted

and what bothered me most was the thickness of that air \ as if something unholy had slipped into the room \ a ring shout of restless boys hollering into the night \ a kaleidoscope of anxious teenagers committed to the ritual of breaking \ popping \ locking the body to free the mind \ hip-hop our scripture \ sneakers shrieking across maple wood \ elbows snapping to the drum’s pulse \ the floor’s glaze like a flowing prism \ light and shadow wrestling until the gym trembled \ our bodies drifting toward the underworld \ suspended between beat and breath \ eyes straining for the heavens \ hell pressing like a hound at the door \ priests hovering on the periphery \ and in every corner i swore i saw fangs \ vampires pining for cold blood \ smoke curling beneath stained glass as if even god himself wasn’t sure whose side to take \ and though i knew better \ every station from BET to PBS to MTV had confirmed our history \ our freedom dreams scattered like confetti across the playground \ our fears melted in the heat of the cypher \ lost in the bowels of our catholic tradition \ wretched sinners that we were \ we pulled one another close from every corner of our concrete jungle \ we knew we had to break \ we knew our lives depended on it \ arms curling into hands \ legs sliding into feet \ shoulders folding into waists \ all unraveling \ all falling apart \ all daring to be born again

and i wondered if the solution to our long division \ to our inherited pain \ to our thirst for blood and hunger for atonement \ was simply this \ to join one to the other \ hand in hand \ and allow ourselves to break \ together \ one body at a time \ to release the pain trapped in dry bones \ to discover the joy buried in cotton mouths \ to reveal the rhythm stitched through our song \ to become living machines \ synthetic pulses transfigured into hymns of rebellion and prayer \ and as i watched my white classmate pop and lock and break \ as the DJ folded my rhythm and blues into the pale blue of his tender eyes \ an ocean of sorrow surfaced between us \ a tide too deep to name \ memories slipping through the teeth of sharks \ ghosts of the waters our ancestors did not choose \ and I wondered \  maybe what i thought was appropriation \ what i thought was toxic flattery \ what i thought was imitation stripped of soul \ maybe it was not what it seemed \ not this time \ not this place \ maybe it was simply us \ boys stumbling and breaking into a dark and lonely world \ bound by a music we could not escape \ haunted by memories we would never forget \ and for a moment i felt it \ not certainty but possibility \ not freedom itself but hope reimagined in the breaking \ trembling like light at the edge of shadow

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The “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene moves in layers.

It is exhilarating, uneasy, and full of contradiction. The music carries both joy and tension, and in that space, appropriation and recognition coexist.

Yet even in the friction, connection emerges, empathy manifests, and collective transformation takes shape.

As Robert and I move through Sinners together, my hope is that these poems create space for us to witness both the fractures and the recoveries in this movie, the dynamic ways we learn to break together, reclaim our history, and discover the true meaning of freedom.

Freedom is not only about who we choose to hold close.

It is also about what we choose to release, what we offer to one another in return, and what allows us to become something greater than ourselves.

Next, we will explore the scene of Sammie’s Return to the Church.

Until then, may this poem remind you that even amid the tensions of cultural difference, our shared humanity can carry us forward.

In solidarity,

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P.S. As always, thank you for reading this edition of Freedom Papers. If you found this piece meaningful, share it with a friend. Let our stories of resilience, justice, and love continue to inspire others, as we all work toward a better, more inclusive future. And write. Write, day and night, my friend. We are running out of time.

Your support gives me the freedom to write from the heart.