Category Archives: Poetry

Shelf-Life

Poetry, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
I was born with an expiration date,
hung from my neck,
stamped like a license plate
It was a notice to the world stating
Get what you can from him because he won’t see 18
He won’t make it to college, not through high school
And do not listen to him when he tells you these are his dreams
Because they’re lies, and whether he recognizes it or not
We, have plans for him
And those plans neither include a family nor a happiness
Because neither are sufficient motivation for him to comply with us
No! for us to get what we want from him,
he must be, broken, shattered, hopeless
And he must believe he is the one responsible for his condition
He must believe it is the result of, his, decisions
That he chose his position
That he had an equal opportunity with everyone else to do something different
He can never know that the wrong side of the tracks
was really red lines on a map
drawn down at city hall
That it was the National Housing Act of 1934
That laid the path for the rise of the ghetto,
urban farms, where it’s not crops that are grown,
but people, stock for cell blocks,
to subsidize markets locked
by inflation from free trade participation in a nation
that ain’t never done shit without enslavement
These are the things he can never know
He cannot know that poverty, like wealth is created
He cannot know that it wasn’t chance,
or a roll of the dice that planted him in impoverishment like cracks in the pavement
He cannot know that the ghetto is not inevitable,
that it is not unchangeable, that being poor is not a fate, not predetermined
but planned, scripted, constricted to particular segments of the society we live
Because should he ever learn these things,
then that is the moment we lose control of him
And we need a continuous supply of workers, strong, and ready to go
Who will accept never drawing a check,
never checking the drawing and asking,
did I ever actually have a chance to live?
Is having a shelf-life really living?
Knowing you are member to a group of human beings they call and endangered species, they, call me, an endangered species
I was never expected to live
Imagine the weight of a license plate like that
If it hung from your neck could you ever stand fully erect, would you perform to your best, if the best you could expect was to somehow slip detection or to die in prison, stamping the plates of future children who will be following your steps
How would you feel?
How would you act?
If you knew the system might have more to gain from your death?
 
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Poetry, ,

If your partners, were skimming profits

Droppin income into losses,

you’d lock the faucets, if you caught them

And if they spent it, on content to keep you impoverished

And dependent upon them

Well, you wouldn’t call’em partners

You’d flip the script, quick, shift the method from exist

To the “Big Payback,” revenge a cold dish

Loyalty a must, betrayal the rust

But why we only feel it from the ones close to us?

Poetry, , , , , , ,

The State claimed to abolish systems of enslavement

With the 13th Amendment, Emancipation Proclamation

But read it closely and you’ll see it defined the method

Intrepid and shrewd progress was arrested

All they had to do was convict a person of a “crime”

Then sell their labor back to plantations and mines

Convict Leasing, a system that expanded

The answer to cheap labor their markets demanded

The Lie

Poetry

The boy with the stars in his hands, thought he had the future in his grasps
But as if he had cupped water it poured through his fingers as time to the past
& as he flipped over the hour glass he found a hole making time running too fast to handle
Gasping for breath from underneath of a strangle hold, of, what if, and what could have been, & But if onlys… trailed off into a whisper of what should have been…

When I was a child, when I was the boy gazing into the heavens blazing trails around the moon and between the stars and it seemed that all horizons were possible, and my parents told me with all the honesty that they could muster through the crusted lies, that I could be anything I wanted to be, that nobody was better than me, that as long as I had my eyes on the prize that no force on earth could ever stop me

All the while knowing the full breadth of the truth and how it would come crashing down upon me, crushing my ribs as it suffocated the last exasperated breath of hope from underneath my bruised and swollen chest, as the fight drained from my eyes like a lion that has been chained so long the bars on the cage were the extent of its visual range

You don’t do that kind of damage to a child who is but learning to spread their wings, because, although it seems improbable, and damn near, down right, impossible… that child might grow into the being that takes flight and ushers in a world of change

So they lied to me, intentionally, to set me free

Drowning See

Poetry

Been on some other shit

Must of missed the mother ship

Took off on another trip

Gone to chill with Artemis

The thought of it is nautilus

Jupiter the stars amiss

Reaching through the seals

To grasp the holy heart of us

Slipping through my fingers

Like it was the fog of ferry’s dust

Well If you walk on water, please come over here and carry us

Omnibus has failed the test

To justify a way to live

Took their books and rhetoric

Of justice boarding slavery ships

Now soulless war machines trail the skies supplant regimes

Dropping bombs on harmless families

Innocent with no more dreams

Rising tides from climate changes

And there goes the Philippines

Still burning fossil fuels, topping mountains, fracking things

Hedonist Americans

The problem is a part of me

Maybe need lobotomy

Been prayin to the heavens

Been drowning in the see

Invisible Walls

Poetry, , , , ,

Stuck in transition

Lacking position

Latitude, Longitude

Complicates Mission

Glossed over vision

The world, no it isn’t

A visit, Cuz this myth

Is bigger than Wizards

My head in orbits

Round phantoms so gorgeous

Dreams in remission

Yo God has been missin

From my prayers

Through night terrors

And Flashes of RAGE

Blank stares, at my wares

I’m locked in a cage

I’m put on display

Just to shock and amaze

Gawked at through windows

I’ve been here for days

There is no escape

From a place that can’t be

I’m telling you now

You bark up the wrong tree

I’m just out of phase

Between your world and mine

Hear but cant see

Smell but cant find

I’m just trying to live

I hope you don’t mind

Crossing the barriers

Encroaching lines

 

 

Stay in your place

Respect your race

You don’t belong, man,

Just look at your face

Been turned all around

Feeling things just like this

Every time I walk

In to their office

My degree don’t mean shit

When I’m caught in the grips

Of whips, chains, and ships

Hist the scars on my wrists

Blind fold my eyes

But there’s still no surprise

America filled

To the brim with its lies

Got their roles and the jobs

All neatly comprised

Prison bed counts

Done from third graders’ eyes

How well they read

Forget what they need

They work or they bleed

Jim Crow concedes

Some walls we see

Others we don’t

Some will believe

Others just won’t

Cuz they’ve not had to cross

Deal with the loss

Traverse the gauntlet

Risk paying the costs

Insufficient Education

Poetry, Rapolitic, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Insufficient, Contradiction, Moral complication ism/
Old division, bend the mission, till we’re left with latent vision/
Ivory tower, pearly gates, not the scape, we’re sent to prison/
Complex is the situation, that we’re facin , isn’t/
A bootstrap problem, then and modern, individualism/
Claiming that we want our fates, while looking through a prism/
Deny the fact, still held intact, that social factors mount/
Adds weight upon our backs, until, we are filled with doubt/
And think we are the issue here, responsible to count/
Choices made, determinant, of what we can amount/
While profiteers, far and near, hold futures in their hands/
The School-to-Prison Pipeline does nothing but expands/
And New Jim Crow is couched, within their sordid plans/
These impossible, almost, insurmountable demands/
Are placed upon us, as we seek to get through school/
Balancing the social pressure, what we’re told is cool/
And traversing through these neighborhoods, red lined to the gills/
Economic exploitation, grounding, that kills/
Jobs are vacant, hopes are waitin, constipation trill/
Estimation, wanting statements, not measuring the skills/
Void of opportunity, take advantage of the dream/
So we turn to other means, to add up all them beans/
Things they claim are criminal, subliminal, the seams/
Are bursting with their lies, and spilling triple beams/
Constricted in the space there is, competitions thrive/
Thus violence erupts, as we’re striving to survive/
Intergenerational, the trauma is alive/
A positive, feedback loop, how dare you to contrive/
That the intersectionality is what we can abide/
When layers of oppression coalesce and deride/
Restrict the options left to us, there’s nowhere left to hide/
Hence revolt and underground, we’re designed to survive/
Stack the odds, weigh them out, and think if you could make it/
Think if only some of them, how complicated/
And explain it to me, how the bootstrap ideology,
Even gets, remotely close, to our reality/
Cuz while in school, we’re always somehow torn apart/
& We live a double consciousness, fused in one heart/
Pushing hard to make it through, cuz our families need us to/
But never quite escape, the plights our people suffer through/
Those of us who make it, a duty, obligation/
Forms by passing through this corporate situation/
To those of us, who deserve to have a fair chance at makin/
Which is everyone, but most of all, the least well off,
They have a right, to receive a decent education/
So, we’re bound to change the circumstances/
Those social factors, stacked within their paths/
So that our people can choose for themselves,
If school is something that they really want to have/

Sleepers

Poetry, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I am pissed beyond belief
It seems there’s no relief
To the ignorance, in people’s minds, locking them to see
From but, one perspective
Like, nothing is subjective
And, every thing else, is a form, of invective
Yet, they claim to be objective & empirical in nature/
facts of the maker
Making up their own data
As skewed as the Matrix,
patrons of the surface layer,
Brains in a vat, down-loading stimulation
Oblivious, to the hideous, truth they clearly miss,
Cuz belief is but opinion & a symptom of a guess,
& the really don’t know/ what the fog has in stow
Cuz the state, they’re incased in, won’t permit, their minds to grow
The evil genius demon, illusion be what he schemin
Left the world to slumber dreamin
Tricked’em into thinkin, awake, while they’re sleepin,
Weep and read it, been defeated, wash and repeat it
Their humanity, so treasured, is depleated,
Free will has been deleted,
interject only to free them
From the, prisons of their minds, barred so completely
They can’t believe, and, won’t see it
Xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-blackness
Fear of the “Other” seems the everlasting way of fascists
Lost in madness, tragic in the coldest sense of stratus(es)
Hitlers in their living rooms, posting facebook statuses
Screaming “all lives matter,” till we move into their hoods
Or when the school-to-prison pipeline, is, clearly understood
As a real mechanism, causing schisms, long the lines of race
Class, religion, gender, economic, time-space
Spanish Inquisition, which followed occupation
color and belief, were, the factors of ENSLAVEMENT
Constricting education, to, stifle alteration
Nothing but, a totalitarian modus operandi inflammation/
Pick and choose’n what is read, or is spoken from the pavement
Lacking opposition, because, that requires questions,
Not, ignorant opinions, of the status quo contingent/
but rather, insurrections that fathom through the nexus
complex is, the structures that perplex us, and bar us from our freedom
Yet, short on the knowledge, of, alter situations
The sleepers are the vanguard, we confront on daily basis
So, the choice is never vacant, it’s always latent, waitin,
Like the worst of constipations/
Do we, have to murk these agents?
Or contend like Morpheus, to wake these sleepers from the Matrix?
And free them from their mind-prisons
The chains of a system that has closed the blinds of wisdom to them
To these drones, these brains in a vat, locked in recidivism
When justice lies, just on the other side, of their manifested ignorance?
To be woke, is both a blessing and a curse
But this tasty wheat, disgusting though it is, I love it,
at least I know what truly hurts.

The B.S. Can Be Deadly

Poetry, Rapolitic

Yo, the bullshit we have to put up with when we try to get anything done for our people/

 

Is worse than attempting to squeeze a camel through the eye of the needle,

 

whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean,

 

I mean, I think of the piece of metal, with a loop in the end that I attempt to mend my clothing with

 

that is smaller than the tip of one of my overly expensive and wasteful pens that I use at college and a camel that is ten times the size of my body with relatively the same weight distribution and attempting to thread that through it

 

It just doesn’t compute, and unless you can provide me with a counter example to make that statement seem more true, I am left with the reasoning that threading a camel through the eye of a needle is almost impossible to do, and to still have a camel on the other end when I am through

 

That is what it feels like trying to get anything positive done for our people

 

The opposition to moving forward is like the gravitational hold the earth has because it is spinning on an axis that pulls me back to the ground every time I attempt to leap to the moon

 

Face plant, sand mask, broken legs and spirit, soaking wet, in a puddle, moping, taxed ain’t nothing clearer, asking the questions that I should never have to ask

 

Why am I loathed, hated, raked over the coals, shunned, disbanded, disenfranchised, debated, ridiculed, chastised, insulted in public and by people I would have called my friends, people I have taken hits from police billy clubs with, for not just resting on my laurels and sitting on my ass, while our people are out here dying?

 

I expected this from the politicians, the police chief, the 206 neo white liberals, screaming let’s just be friends, can’t we all just get along, wasn’t everything just so good when you were not paying attention to the brutal police force we hired to kill you, maim you, terrorize your nieces and nephews, the disparities in Seattle Public Schools, the unjust displacement of low income families, the eradication of black entrepreneurs, the denial of tribal nations’ sovereignty, the degradation of the planet, the rampant anti-blackness, can’t get hired the fact is, that when you just stayed in your place and didn’t make waves that is when we were the happiest and we know that you were, too, so just get back into your place because #AllLivesMatter dude

 

Yeah, I expected that shit, and I still get a whole lot of it too

 

But I can weather that like water under the bridge, par for the course, puddles on the road, got rain boots on, like I am prepared for this so pour, I can choose to engage or ignore, it all depends on how much I think will be gained be investing my energy in store, keeping score, sometimes it simply doesn’t matter how much truth these closed-minded, closet racists imbibe or how many facts implore a different perception, they are like little Igors to their masters of white-bellittlency, and the ideology of individualism that ignores the contextual realism that displays the realities we face at their cores

 

 

 

And it is the same shit no matter where it is that we go, stereotyped and dismissed from the moment we open the door, but we expect that and are prepared for that

 

All I am saying is that it is difficult enough when at any time I may be made dead or imprisoned, I may be kicked out of school, lose funding, not be able to get a job for a very long time or find a place to live, dealing with the reality that I have been beat up by the police multiple times and that it is going to happen again and again, and that I face these threats and dangers, these risks each time I head into the street to put my body between injustices and the harms they cause, each time I walk into a council chamber to testify, each time I sit on a panel or grab a microphone and start speaking truth

 

without being torn down by those I never built walls to defend myself against, who can reach the deepest, cut my soul to pieces, mercilessly and without recourse or consequence, and can kill the movement inside of me

 

the bullshit we have to put up with when we try to get anything done for our people, can be deadly