By VB
I came from nothing
or so they claim.
But something from nothing
is outrageous.
You need
at least
a lil’ bit
to make
anything.
I’m here to stay,
forever I’ll remain
a Free Mind,
Open Heart.
My actions
you won’t dictate.
Untitled
January 1, 2019 by 12 Comments
Platforms
December 17, 2018 by 10 Comments
By JK
Platforms and I’m not talking about the shoes,
I’m writing about the people speaking who don’t have a clue
Platforms that were built on my L4 and L5,
giving me chronic back pain from all the verbal jive
Let’s expand on this privilege, the subject at hand,
this platform of yours where you make your grandstand
So absorbed in your spot that you place others in the dark,
never even a thought to appreciate their written art
What is an effort if not the effort to simply write,
judgmental of creativity where comes your insight
In the sixteen-hundreds, the rave was the selling of slaves,
all carried out on high from the platforms that was raised
A jumble of words is all that we saw,
yet 3/5ths of a man was written constitutional law
Words are intentions behind inventions
so next time you’re on that platform…
before I was
and after I am…
A Young Black Prince Dream
November 12, 2018 by 7 Comments
By HC
Young black prince
living in a world
that don’t recognize your presence,
your existence feeling
the wrath of your resistance,
seeing the hate in your eyes
from morning and evening news lies.
Young black prince,
the odds are against you
but you have to hold strong
like a clenched black fist,
mighty enough to turn
your past into existence
from a prince to a king!
A young black prince dream!
They Don’t Want Us to Recite Our Poems
December 18, 2017 by 3 Comments
By AG
They don’t want us to recite our poems, don’t want the people to behold any signs or see any symbols and they d-mn sure don’t want us to know that the ancestors are with us. They don’t want us to recite our poems.
They fear the foreign sounds of our secret language: Hope. They thought it long dead. They are afraid of the spread of our fever how it creeps along the sense—our hearing and seeing, our awakening perception, our ability to sniff out what’s false.
The willingness to feel our most painful wound, the taste of blood on our lips. They don’t want us to recite our poems.
They are afraid of the promise of our spring, the way mother earth blushes green for us, hiding her gift in full view of both the strong and weak alike.
She has shown us fine stones in a babbling brook: love, faith, courage, tenacity, and understanding. They fear the inevitable fall of their rampaging giants.
They don’t want us to recite our poems. They want us to die with our songs unsung. They want to bury our burnt-out husks perfectly preserved shells, with sightless eyes of bitter black smoke and a mouthful of tightly clenched pearl-white teeth, trapping inside, for all eternity, the music that they desperately fear.
They don’t want us to recite our poems.
If
February 27, 2017 by 4 Comments
By JMA
If prisons
Lease our liberty
If seas
Rent our shores
If silence
Hustles penny songs
If power
Purchases helplessness
Then into this world
I step renewed
To float unbound
Cocooned in pleasure, in pain
Not yet spent
Comprehend, contained
A desperate paradigm
Unknown, unborn, untainted
If this time
I can love myself enough to live
