19300
I wrote my first poem the minute I came out from between my mother’s legs, it was a Thursday night in the middle of August, no I didn’t arrive with a pen, only cries, cause the light hurt my eyes, and when I finally adjusted, I screamed some more saying oh , God make me Black, I started to reach for my back to feel the two strikes they say are branded on me from birth, I looked to the left, oh , there’s my father, that’s the guy who wasn’t supposed to be here, he gotta full beard, a fro and a hooked mustache, I thought hell yeah, I’m the son of shaft, oh , this white lady is grabbin me, smacking me on my ass, I hope this isn’t a futre premonition of the police beating my ass, I mean damn, how could my first poem be so blissful and scary at the same damn time, I continued to write as I got older in age, I found myself rippin pages out of my diary when I learned grandaddy disappeared on my grandmother, snatch, I tried to write another piece, it started off, I came home again to mom and dad arguing again, snatch, I started to write again, and it started your best friend has been hit by a car and died before he ever started to live life, snatch, and I throew that pen, I said *** poetry, cause my life can not be contained on mere pages, my fingerprints are imprinted on basketballs I tossed thorugh chain nets as a child, my smile was locked up for disfunction during my younger years, which ironically predicted the future life of my peers because even after release, some of em went back behind the cage, the same way my teeth got a repeat two year sentence for going crooked again, even after my parents dropped 5Gs the first time on braces, I remember when I first strappd up my laces, went through a gas chamber, they say they were trying to toughen me up, but maybe they tried to gas me up, have me thinkin that because I joined the military, you will now be looked on as equal, and all these years later, even after serving the country, I,m still missing my 2/5ths, but my community can still buy fifths on the corner, Black kids where I'm from get excited when they see the coroner, cause sometimes, that’s the only man they know with a legit 9 to 5, and damn, I just thought how at the age of 9, some young brothers are learning how to become fathers when they haven’t even learned how to become a son yet, all because daddy never showed up, see my poems are not written with pen, they are spoken in the numerous broken spirits inside of me that become whole, whenever I get a mic...
