More Poems
~ in their final stages
Body conversation
“One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
How does one find a space cloud without
a region collapsing within, giving light
to night, from crushing dust to turbulence:
The nebula spreads its wings, embracing its kin,
its stars, its namesake, affording us a glimpse
into the swirling chaos, harmony of mass,
of gravity, dance, where the mind-body
pauses, synchronizing the fall and rise,
of breath, it waits,
patient that the chaotic fire will form
an ever so steady perfect union,
composed of stardust, of us, of two bodies—
You are the gravity/
I am the mass—
Together, we give creation to more
than we thought to witness or understand.
One of many systems
overview emotional math
You’re born into to it like ignorance. external system
There is no escaping it. You live it.
It’s a matter of degrees, of reeducating
yourself and your sphere
of influence lest you succumb
to its engineering plight,
its machinations since
this country’s inception
because it’s woven into the fabric, bruised morality
tendrilled deep so that the film
must bleed red, white, and blue.
It’s your grand country built
on pain, difficult to fathom,
yet true all the same. It’s Racism, attached System:
assess Truths classism constrained, the mass poor
laboring for the few, the whites
competing against exploitation,
finding blame
in the millions of blacks
robbed of their true worth. Theory
Slavery is Racism: exploitation by degrees. Equation
Degrees by exploitation: Racism is Slavery. Proof
From ≈ 1619 to 1776 to 1865 to 1926 to 1965.
157+89+61+39 = 246+100 simplified 346
From 1965 to 2013 voting restrictions Suppression
From… calculating…
There are multiple ways to read this poem: I prefer to read the faint text with a different—emotionless (clinical or robotic)—voice.
​
Optionally, a second person could recite the faint text while another recites the visible text.
Cause
Talk’n brash and loud ain’t allowed,
especially if your black, especially
if your group is mostly black.
You best not be high neither
lest you be accused of tweak’n:
Clearly, our defs differ. Mostly legal,
shrooms and weed; though it’s still illegal
to be so difficult, like walk’n the streets
at night just to be pinned, grounded
by cops searching the skies
for anything unbefitting, like a brotha
who strayed too far from The CD;
nope, sorry, I meant Skyway,
soon to be black-displaced,
​
so you best raise your voice
lest your tones fizzle and sputter—
white walls fixed in stillness,
the antithesis of movement.
Ghost branches
Reminders act as failure injectors, nightmares
comprised of unsolved murders, of mistakes,
paths better left undisturbed, and untapped
routes taken only in dreams:
empty branches.
But the days
celebrated, families together drawn
serve a purpose, a gentle yet set reminder,
though I require no remembrance,
efforts I rather forget, scarred misgivings,
days and nights studded with insomnia.
This is the part, when and where, I confess,
but I have nothing more to write; my pain
is my own, selfishly allayed though
—wave scatter—
I concede, as my wake of regrets trail
behind me for future restless days
I can’t forsake that my fate,
my occupied branches rustling,
guide and haunt me,
ghosts whispering in vain.
Open mic recording
Caskets
Injustice flays my thoughts with language,
loaded, halfcocked, whereas perspective
hones, aligns the old with the new,
forging a view, while the world quietly thrives.
Snapping sticks beneath and above,
swollen in the notions of wrongs,
rights however blameless from weeds and waste,
I can’t get the image I’ve constructed to fade
because there is no relief for those
who might have been.
Pass the ugliness if you can bare the face,
or what’s left of it.
What does a weapon of war do to a person,
a child? Imagine it.
Maddened by our helplessness,
by our fatherly contradictions,
we scoff, chafing radically left and right,
to careen into self-made oblivion,
bone wall of gaping jaws,
we arm our schools,
should we survive.
One simply can’t help but kick, scatter them,
these bones, which don’t reassemble, yet tally
with our sensationalized violence
across our cracked pavement,
should the earth reclaim them.
Breathe the dusty air, widen the perspective,
compel the powerful, you, to act,
and clench our most recent debris—
bloody bones locked
with our past malignancy,
to contravene with our desensitization.
Dare we say no?
—"No more.”
​
Open the casket, peer inside,
and if you can't bare the face of it,
crawl inside for you surely must be dead;
or better yet, open the lower half
and admire the perfection of someone else
tying their shoes,
assuming they still had time to master it.
