Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Life is hard sometimes

It just is, and that's a hard thing to accept. I have some issues, I know I do. I got all kinds of things to work out, but I am doing it. I've made a lot of progress love, but like I said, life is hard. I look around, I am working, I am writing, I am pushing myself to work even when I least feel like it, and I am not taking the crap that I used to take.
I am also being honest. I am not the man that I used to pretend to be. I need to take my ass to church.
I sent my son home today and I see so much of myself in him. It's true that we pass on to our kids what we don't work through. I see him struggling with things that I still struggle with in my adulthood. We are both absent minded, sensitive people. I see that he also has some esteem issues and that's something that I struggled with.
I don't know what the point of this post is, but I am just trying to get the stuff out of my head so I can process it.
He's a great kid though and I want the best for him. I am determined to do the best I can for him, which means pushing harder than I've pushed to this point. People want to say that it's not the money you give, but having money and not having to worry about things like healthcare or healthy food, or having enough space, all those things lend themselves to a high quality of life.
I want to give my kids the life they deserve, and I get really frustrated with myself because money is so short. I am accustomed to struggling, but this struggle is one that I am really tired of.
My faith is my strength. I will abide in that.
Peace

Friday, August 05, 2005

some new poems

Untitled 1

Hot bullets + your young lungs=the end of breathing

Too many young black men
Line up to hold and carry
Black burners
That hold hot bullets
Specially designed to pierce your young flesh
Non discrimination when and where they choose to enter, to meet your vital organs
They rush to remove the air from your lungs and replace it with blood
They want to push you closer to the ground


So now it’s you or the 15 year old with the hand grenade, who knows that he is going to die and is intent on taking you with him. He has concentrated his whole lifes meaning into an explosive power held in his right hand and he is intent on taking you with him.
It is not my fault!” You scream as he runs towards you, because you signed up to be here, “To be all that you could be” in this place 17thousand miles away from your front step and the car you bought with your “signing bonus” you don’t even get cheap gas, you won’t ever drive it again and if you die, who will pay it off? But it is your fault because you signed up for bullet proof vests, concrete bunkers, internet phone calls home and halfway armored wannabe HUMVEES.
And now, looking at this boy who has your death in his eyes, who has his death day written on his heart, and all you want to do is go home, fuck the mission, you want to live. You want to go to home, which is the very place that you signed up to escape from.
But niggas is dying all over the world and now it’s contest about where, how and who gets to kill you-the block or the battlefield. For most of us the block is the battlefield, so you choose your battles and die well.
-M 8/05

The color of power

What’s the color of power? Coz whiteboys walking around in my neighborhood don’t look too scary. Don’t look too dangerous, don’t look too tuff. And niggas in boardrooms often look constipated and emasculated-but I seem to remember that Frederick Douglass was a rider. I seem to recall that Nat Turner, Toussaint, Fanny Lou Hamer and Sojourner They was some real troopers, no they were commanders, they had real power.
They did not wait, for their freedom, for other people to tell them they were free. They stepped up to the plate and demanded theirs.

Untitled 2

We b cookie cutouts
Bboy
Black revolutionary
Tupac ologists
Ride for ours
Day and night
Night and Day
We West Coast East Coast Midwest Downsouth to overseas
Us be them that light the world on fire
We roll it up
Smoke it
Leave a trail behind us
Blaze one for all to follow
Believe that
Because we be that
Cookie cutter
Black revolutionaries
Give high fives to
Set fire to minds
And flesh if necessary
Remix-wait for the
Remix they brewin now in K to Eights
Worldwide
It’s going to be so fucking cold….
We be cookie cutter
Bboy revolutionaries

Dance furiously
Tear the roof off the motherfucker

Us light up the night with our bodies and voices
Dance so hard our sweat glisten and glow
We shinin-no diamonds needed
We bold, we strong, we cold
We leave our names on walls
Our stories fly through the air And our love is eternal.
-M

untitled 3

You have been black for 5110 days
I have been the same for 12 410 days
And together we have less 20, 000 of not being Negroes
Of not being deemed human here in our place of residence
Where we are supposed to believe in, sign up for “Homeland Security”

The Patriot Act does seem to be
Designed for others
And I worry about that.
But America the Beautiful
She better not move too fast
Because it’s a lot of us
Citizens/resident aliens
That still got internment camp dreams
And real strange forearm tattoos
America been busy bracing herself
For the invasion that already happened

But US got a hard on for fat culos
And brown nipples
Nappy hair and brown skin
Stay hot
-M


Untitled 4

Today Reagan died
And I am really waiting on them to
Half mast the President
Whole bunch of residents
Highly disaffected
Feel betrayed and rejected
Really disrespected
But Dubya
Couldn’t care less
Carefree nights and
Days
A real Texas Killing machine
“I remember” says the Alamo
to the young Mexican rifleman
You will bear arms once again
Mijo-fear not.
You will fight again.