Video Playlist

Video Playlist

WE ARE MUSICAL NOTES
shaking beat-down accords on BX corners,
tracing the wavelength of Caribbean heat.
I’m a Pac verse over a Neptune beat,
all the confused righteousness and fire of a young martyr
lain over a sea of spacey purples, glistening silvers, and shiny patton leather reds.
I’m a reggae scat sung way too fast for anyone to understand,
with way too much rhythm to ignore.
I am the drunken squiggling path from the ass to the dancefloor.
I’m Jazzy Jeff and Primo scratching Robert Frost,
til the woods become ‘hoods,
and the road not taken is made of concrete and chalk outlines.
I’m Marvin Gaye, softly singing TS Eliot
over music made for making babies. I’m the space
between every song in your iPod and
a scribbled idea in a notepad,
so put us on a playlist
pop in your headphones and
PRESS PLAY.
Quiet, like disease and morning coffee.
Raindrops jealously echo licked lips
watching from the wet window glass as we
watch each other’s naked writhing bodies–
PAUSE!!! SKIP.
I spit from lips laced with land mines,
launching lethal language left and right like hand signs
from a tongue like a tech 9, t-t-tech 9.
I wreck lines, line after line like coke addicts.
So rapid, so fast its like two lines ago (tech 9, t-t-tech 9)
ugh, automatic.
PAUSE. SKIP.
My systematic schematic
is to break static, and make emphatic wakes
with every step I take. I don’t rap,
but I get slack and phosphatic.
I’m ecstatic to say that my socratic cliches
can relate. I have a habit to create.
The fact is, you don’t have to make sense
to make cents, and I’m just as sick as any
talentless nigga paying rent with wack shit.
PAUSE. FAST FORWARD.
My systematic schematic
is to make static and break emphatic wakes
with every step I take. I don’t rap,
but I get slack and phosphatic.
I’m ecstatic to say that my socratic
cliche’s can relate, I have a habit to create.
PAUSE!!! SKIP.
Speak to me,
four words with life,
live!
Can I sew us into something
changing and inconstant?
The dashing we do changes everything.
PAUSE… REWIND?
Everything changes.
Do we?
Dashing the inconstant
and changing something into us
so I can live a life
with words for me to speak.
STOP!!! Please stop!
Needless to say, we can do this
all day. We are poets.
And if you don’t let us spit
we’d probably explode with witty quips
and gritty drips of what it is.
So do your best
to find at least one poet every day and
PRESS PLAY

Sit    still

Sit        still
Two words that hit like “kill yourself”
As her toes tapped during math class
She didn’t look like much
Just a shy little girl
clothes too big for her
And a smile too small for her age
But lil did they know…….
The clothes were still too small for her soul
And the smile was the wry smirk of warrior
So she tapped her feet
slow and steady
til the tap tap became a BOOM BAP
and heaven could see the vibrations
Now she’s a goddess
The ground shakes under her
Rattling like the space between lovers
Jittering like the tips of fingers hanging
from hands waiting to touch someone new
Quaking like lost hearts
Rumbling like a war zone
As she floats like an angel deflecting bullets
And saving soldiers
Moving with every boom
like a speaker pulsing with every beat
Like bombs were bursting in her abdomen
And shrapnel was bouncing off her ribcage
Carving her heart into a dagger sharp
enough to cut through diamond mines
she doesn’t dance
she marches
toes pointed like AKs
shouldered by rebel soldiers
never holstered
ready to give everything til she’s empty
and her body lays limp in the hushhhhhhhh
SHHHHH
Shhhhhhhhhhh
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Just a sound to most
But to me a death sentence
As I whispered rhymes
over a dirty mead notebook
with my eyes closed
to a distant toe tap on the other side of the school

No matter what my age is
I was made to blaze stages
11 yrs old and already spitting lasers
I’m the king

There was nothing intimidating about me
6’ limbs hanging from a 5’ torso
all tied together by braces and ugly glasses
but the truth is
those glasses were x-ray binoculars
used to see into the souls of everyone around me
the braces were to hold in my teeth when I spit
cause I always had a voice bigger than my lungs could carry
With a heart bigger than my brain and a mouth that intercepted the words
before the two could communicate
Now I’m a God
And I chuckle at the days when teachers tried to stifle us
Everyday another suggested suicide
Every period another death sentence
Chalk flaking off pointed fingers as they asked us
To fold our wings under our backpacks
Fasten our lips
And walk and talk like everybody else
Squeeze in with the mortals
lol
the two of us
we’re an army of gods unto ourselves
this is our Mt. Olympus
So next time you see a kid tapping his feet
Or scribbling in a notebook
Or doodling on his hands
Or fidgeting with a broken watch
Be quiet and observe
You’re witnessing a god in the making

St. Joan of Arc, you managed to preserve your self,
died at nineteen: a virgin—
having given your self to God.
What all did he whisper to you
in the fields behind your house
as you tended to cattle and adolescent dreams?

Did he say that he was love?
Give you of his body and tell you to eat—
what ecstasy! Did he leave
stigmata on your feet and palms,
as he has done to so many other girls?

Why do men hurt that which they love?

This was your first calling,
though you were not his first.
Where you his last?

Unlike you, Joan,
I had no cattle or sheep to tend,
only the heavy solitude that is inherited
by middle children and only sons.
No fields to run through or pastures
in which to hide, only then to be found by God—
only concrete and crack-house-corned streets.

Playtime was in the basement.
There, I often danced
alone in front of a ceramic statue of Christ.
His eyes we empty, hollow,
hiding everything yet nothing.

But his eyes were always on me, so
I danced for him, giving
of my body—Eucharist incarnate.
He was always willing to watch.
Never did he look away, never
told me to stop. Always observant,
silent.

Nighttime: parents out of the house,
my face pushed into pillow and sheets,
arms and legs outstretched,
palms placed up. My body,
a human cross—juvenile crucifixion,
though I prayed long and hard
for God to save me and
give reason to my suffering!

He response: silence.
No divine intervention.

His hands we rough,
smell of smoke and taste of wine on his lips.
Told me I was special.
Like you, Joan, I was to be a vessel.
In me, he implanted his divinity.
I alone carry that burden,
knowing that, one day, it will be the death of me.

But Joan, you were the special one,
not I. God was always with you,
led you through all harm and danger
and into Heaven.
I was forsaken—a sacrificial lamb maybe.

My dream had always been of martyrdom.
Little did I know that I was destined
to play the role of victim.
Like you, Joan, I too was not spared.
But where was my God,
as I screamed and squirmed,
supplicating him to stop.

Maybe it was that he could not hear me?
Was his mind unhearing to the shrills
that one omits when skin stretches,
rips and bleeds?
Maybe it was that he did not care to?

I listened to the example of God
and learned to keep silent.
Did not speak out for the fear of being called
a heretic, a liar, insane, demented…
by those I loved.
Kept lips and eyelids shut.

I would not be burned at the stake like you, Joan,
but suffered the pains of betrayal all the same.
I was no martyr
but an outcast nonetheless.
I too now carry a cross, so
I call to you, Joan.
Tell me, how does one come to forgive
that which they fear and hate?
Be my staff and help me rise.
I have been bent over praying on knees
to a deaf God for far too long.

Your weapons were a banner, armor, an army, horse and sword.
My arms: penn, paper and this weary voice.
But I would trade mine for yours any day
if doing so came with the promise of victory
over past memories and
every man that prays on children.
I would wage a war,
its clamor so loud it wakes the dead
and God, who dreams on,
incognizant of his children calling.

Joan, will you be my saving knight,
the voice that does not abandon me at night,
in fire, burning coals or in the midst of mobs.
You don’t have to say anything just
yet.  Only, give
me fruit that will not spoil and
grace that will not slip out from my hands.

…I don’t really know what you think of me…
can’t quite sense the heat behind your lantern smile,
so if you won’t use its flicker to guide me,
I hope you don’t mind if I inch in a little bit closer.
See, I’d like to believe that real-life love must be as simple as it is for those two lovers,
storybook ending etched lifeline deep into Father Time’s palms-
but poets are only good at reading passion in pages and song
so hopeless romantic that I may be,
I can’t seem to read your mixed signals
no matter how often I play them on repeat.
I’ve been in love twice,
and learned that love is a four-ton pendulum
that sways to the fickle eight-count of two heartbeats
only to be knocked off-balance by distance or mistrust or wild oat sowing
or all of that other bullshit
that’s made every relationship I’ve ever witnessed
dangle precariously in the balance-
love, pendulum that it is,
but I’m just looking for someone to stand still with.

You…frighten me,
you hide behind jigsaw puzzle eyes,
you…with your ribs as window blinds-
I’ve never met a flower so afraid of the sun,
come undone,
be an unraveled stem -
spill the cherry blossoms from your gut
like red wine leaking from a paper cup-
’cause I know love comes and goes like the seasons,
but it’s springtime…
this mid-April breeze is feisty,
rustling its way through our clothes a little bit inappropriately.
The sun is shining like she’s got electromagnetic mascara for rays,
and I could have sworn, this morning, she batted her eyelashes your way.
It’s a time for flirting–
heartbreak and fear were so last season,
so today, I just wanna hold your hand.
Let’s be kids again, cavalier, unafraid of anything
but our own reflections in the mirror-
we’ll pretend its prom night,
and we’re fashionably late to a red carpet of rose petals,
firefly strobe lights and a dance floor of clementines.
Let me fashion my lips as rock climbers,
and I’ll scale the ridges of your cheekbones
then lay softly in the willow hammock of your dimples.
I just want to bite into this awkward silence like an overripe peach,
and have all those nervous conversations that we’ll laugh at when we’re thirty
and you’ve memorized the freckle coordinates on my skin,
and I’ve played cartographer to you,
mapped your blue Nile veins
and that meteorite scar tissue you keep shrouded
from every stranger in your stratosphere.

I’ve circumnavigated you for months,
but there’s something empty about living weightless -
so if you see a satellite in your skyline,
it’s me— I’m tired of hovering.
Just about ready for that quantum leap
so orient me,
compass-rose kiss a bag of wind in my direction.
Have it whistle me an opera.