For Mom

She has the softest hands on Earth

Despite years of working, moving, lifting, building,

Clapping, and almost chopping off fingers while cooking,

Her green thumbs have not only planted flowers and vines,

the maple trees that shade our yard,

And too many tomato plants to count,

But also have grown and nurtured a

scholar, musician, and activist

out of a curly headed sapling

Over twenty three years of

planting seeds of knowledge and

Allowing me to decide how to sow them.

She lives in books and comes alive in between

Pages and paragraphs,

Between her imagination and her doodles in the margins,

Finding solace, humanity, and sometimes even herself in

The heroes, villains, flora, fauna,

and fairies she meets on her way.

She may very well be one of them,

Possibly a gnome.

Turning greys into Technicolor,

bringing depth into people’s two dimension lives,

My mother makes it clear that

you don’t need a PhD to be wise.

Nor do you need more than a desire

to know a lot to learn a lot,

and that there is so much that

you don’t know that you don’t know

in addition to what you know you don’t know

and what you actually do know,

so there are very few reasons

to stop trying to know more.

She’s earned every speck of silver in her once Arizona sunshine blonde hair,

Through working, through fighting,

Through learning, laughing, dancing,

And through standing strong

In bad times that felt like landslides,

And in stressful times when every option

was uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on.

She knows that there is strength in

letting yourself be vulnerable,

And that weakness is less a failure or a flaw

Than it is a call for self-care,

Be it a nap, a movie, a margarita,

Or dancing in the living room to Led Zeppelin.

And she slings the weight of the world over her shoulders

As though it is as light as air,

Willing to hear out and help anyone

carry their baggage along the way,

And she hears you, and sees you,

because you are interesting,

and you have something to say

that she’d like to listen to,

Even if it is the saddest or

oddest thing she’s heard all year.

More than she knows, my mom has taught me.

She’s taught me that there are

so many ways to love people

Beyond being in love with someone,

That someone’s worth has nothing to do

With how many dollars are in their bank account,

That it is okay to fail, as long as I’ve tried,

That no matter how much money, effort, and poetry

No one can make someone love them if they don’t,

And instead of trying to document

every lie I’ve been told,

I should focus on keep short the list of lies that I’ve told,

Not because honesty is the best policy,

But because transparency feels better than guilt,

And “what ifs” sting longer than “oh wells.”

And that I can’t be afraid of change no matter

Who or what I’ve built I’ve world around.

So I’ll shout three cheers to moms,

Especially mine,

Who sang me Peter, Paul, and Mary

Instead of Mary Had a Little Lamb,

Now, I’ve got a hammer,

I’ve got a bell,

And I’ve got a song to sing

In appreciation and gratitude,

Because whether I am one,

I am two,

I am three,

I am four,

I am five hundred miles away,

I’ll always know where home is. 

Strange Fruit

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

The lives of black folks are hanging in the balance,

Between intrigue and fear,

Violence and tokenization,

Curiosity and suspicion,

Between being the face of crime and being completely ignored,

Between living and dying.

Contrary to popular belief,

racism in the United States has not ended,

We are not living in a post-racial society,

Things are not better, they are different.

Progress has been made,

But in an old dog system that is finding

New and improved ways to get away with old tricks,

Black lives will keep hanging in the balance.

Children may be growing up in an age in which

They don’t believe it is impossible

for a black man to be the president of the US,

But they will still grow up with

history books that tell them that

The Civil Rights Movement was the beginning

of the decline of racism in America,

And the election of Barack Obama

was the final checkpoint.

They’ll learn that Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is less

a celebration of his life and radical work

Than it is a day off of school

Seasoned with blissful ignorance

about his politics and ideologies

Beyond “I Have a Dream,”

Because making a holiday and

renaming schools and streets in his honor

Is more important than knowing who he really was.

If racism is over and MLK’s dreams have come true,

How are black folks are still getting

Hired less, paid less,

and being trusted less than white folks?

What amount of ignorance and complacency does it take

To make comfort and fear

adequate justification for the continuation of

What the Civil Rights Movement

and Obama’s election supposedly fixed?

This post-racial society that we allegedly live in is the

Same society that tells little brown boys and girls that,

Even in pretend,

Disney fairytales aren’t made for kids like them,

Where they’re told that they

look so much nicer when their hair is straight,

Told how surprisingly articulate

or not like the others they are,

And are expected to be the voice of

all black folks everywhere in their classrooms,

Where any position or profession they assume will be preceded by their race,

“black doctor,” “black coworker,” “black friend,”

And every criminal and inmate

will be assumed to be black before being revealed,

Often by the same people that cry colorblindness,

Where they’ll be asked where they are from

more often than

They will be asked who they are,

what they do, and what they think,

Or, in many cases,

brilliant black youth are being written off and not

Really being taught by anyone,

Being told that knowledge is power and then

given no access to acquire it.

If getting a good education

requires having money,

And having a lot of money

requires having a job that pays well,

And having a job that pays well

generally requires getting a good education,

What surprises people about dropout, unemployment, crime, and prison rates

In poor communities of color?

How can you obtain access to

resources to opportunities that you’ve

Never been told existed for you?

Few people climb gearless up

mountains they’ve never heard of,

Especially if the tallest thing they’ve been shown

is the view out of their front doors.

Being told that we have to be the

change we wish to see in the world

Seems impossible in a place

Where fear of what could be personally lost

Outweighs the empathy that wants others to gain,

And where people from the communities

That need change the most

Are being incarcerated, discarded, and silenced

because their brown skin

makes them look an awful lot like

the next accused criminal the police are searching for.

From prison, you can’t pay or vote your way into a better world.

While the police are fully engaged in a stop and frisk,

Shoot now, think later competition,

People are continuing to master the turn away,

Cry while watching or reading about it,

Post it to Facebook and forget it ever happened

Approach to responding to civil injustices,

And if they can’t be moved because

This stuff doesn’t happen to folks like them,

If they can’t imagine that black youth on their screens

Shot to death by the people that are

supposed to protect them

Being their friends, siblings, cousins, or children,

I unfruitfully wish that they’d be moved by the humanness,

By the fact that that dead young person

is a loving, loved human being

That is trying to make it through just like everyone else.

Please, tell the families and friends

of all of the strange fruit showing up

In prison, in the media,

At bus stations, on the dark walk home,

or those not being acknowledged at all,

That racism no longer exists.

There are so many young people of color

Who will never be given the opportunity or option

To tell their stories and recite their creations

In a place just like this in front of a crowd just like yall,

because they are trapped in poverty, prison, or graves,

All products of a perfectly functioning,

Perfectly destructive system,

Where murder and self-defense have different parameters

depending on the color of the skin of those involved,

and where, if I didn’t know better,

I’d be positive that the same people

commenting in online forums

That the young men dying like

Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant

Deserve what came to them,

And wishing their Facebook friends a

“Happy Dead Nigger Day” on Martin Luther King Day

are the same people who gathered in mass to watch

neighborhood lynchings and

Pay ten cents apiece for links of the ropes

That hung innocent men in the streets decades ago.

But they are different people

Living generations apart, in the same mindset of

“if you aren’t white, you aren’t human,

If you aren’t white, you don’t deserve to live”

That, the more things change,

the more they remain the same.

I can only be wary of those who only condemn the past

And believe it is independent of the present,

Who say that they can’t be penalized

Because of the actions of their ancestors,

Who refuse to be held accountable for

Perpetuating and growing comfortable

In an unjust system.

If we don’t think about the past,

we won’t talk about the past,

And then we’ll repeat it, remix it, and

Call it progress.

Things don’t change because of time,

Things change because of people,

As long as we live in a place where people will defend their favorite celebrity,

Before they will lend a speck of empathy to those who are

being oppressed and murdered around them,

the same people who will benefit most

if history repeats itself

will keep telling black folks to ‘get over it,’

and will help maintain the barriers that confine us,

calling what we fight for and what we are angry about

‘fighting hate with hate’ or ‘reverse racism.’

The questions that people don’t want the answers to

Are the ones that need to be asked.

Why aren’t  you angry?

Why was that joke so funny to you?

Do we really live in a post-racial society?

We can’t fear the past,

We can’t ignore it.

We must learn together,

Grow together,

Love together,

And change together.

We can have and reach our dreams,

Lift every voice and sing,

Knowing that

Our lives are worth far more than the places

We’ve been left hanging, and

We shall overcome long before we will forget.

“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

Tango

(written 6/2011, collaboration with Chase Wiggins)

She said she wanted me to take the lead,

But nobody told her that I have two left feet,

And the dance I taught myself doesn’t quite fit the choreography

Expected for such an intricate dance.

I don’t always move in rhythm, but

If she wants me to dance, I’ll dance a fierce left footed tango

All in attempt not to humiliate myself in finding a line between

Maintaining my composure and leading her.

Don’t get carried away, she said. It was just a joke,

But it was one of those truthie kinds of joke,

That’ll often tell a person more than enough.

Of course I know that, Don’t worry about it,

But my words blurred the truth as surely as they were slurred.

And so we danced around in diction,

Salsaed in slipper syntax,

And tangoed in tangled words,

Me being gentle as not to smother her,

Passionately as to prove my capability and skill,

But I cannot even begin the steps without getting carried away

Because every time I get myself into this predicament is

More enveloping than the last,

And never have I encountered a more addictive partner,

However, well, I can’t actually dance,

And frankly, she wouldn’t have had me even if I could.

I Love You?

(written 6/2011, collaboration with Chase Wiggins)

I never requested that you said you love me

but I liked the way it sounded,

the way those three small syllables

could become so monumental as they

slid past your tongue, between your lips,

nestling themselves behind my ears in a whisper

so faint that I could hardly hear them.

I screamed I love you from the rooftops.

Not because I really understood the words,

But simply because I wanted to be heard,

And still all you heard was a whisper.

I did not, however, realize that you had

strategically placed these 'I love you's

in crisp breezes around the city

to be heard by anyone that caught your eye.

Years of subtle love, expressed in quiet actions,

Had left me alone and ignored in this city.

So I began to shout, and like most urban artists,

Sent up toxins and beauty, in equal measure, to the winds.

And yet I never really liked the way it sounded,

So much as I was simply afraid of the silence.

I was too smitten and distracted by your beauty

that I didn't notice when

"don't" and "anymore" joined

"i love you" gently behind my ears,

deaf from the details that screamed for me to 

walk in the exact opposite direction 

the moment the world around us became too 

beautiful to be real.

I was too busy drowning in my loneliness

To notice that the sounds of my love

Had changed completely.

Too desperately attached to being alone,

To notice that you had been listening.

And as I limp towards the moment this world

Starts to feel real again, I stop to wonder:

If anyone had told us from the start

That we both deserve much better,

Would either of us have listened?

Sometimes

(written 6/2011, collaboration with Chase Wiggins)

Sometimes, you don't need to know what time it is

because as we lose track of the minutes,

we have more moments to let go and find ourselves

in places beyond the simplicity of where we are

and who we are when the clock strikes on the hour.

I wish I could tell you that it will all get easier

that if we lean against each other,

we'll stand strong enough to handle any wind

that could knock us down, but we will falter

and fall, and we'll cry and rebuild.

Let me be your rock, for I am heavy with

people's secrets and anchored down,

ankle deep in people's tears, and I 

may not know where we are going,

but I can try to get you anywhere but here.

Or maybe it’s you who will finally take me away,

Because I think you know me well enough

To realize that it’s really me who desires change,

And I hope you love me well enough,

To turn my desire into your will to hoist anchor,

Set sail. Go. Anywhere but here.

Here. Where, earthbound as I am,

The ticking of the clock beats out the monotony

That defines my life. As mundane as worms,

Making dirt and dirt making up the earth.

Yes. I am an anchor, but I hear you have a jetpack.

And while I doubt that it’s big enough to move me,

I’m still excited for you to hit the ignition.

And even if I cannot fly there with you,

In watching you, I find myself, as I dream of a place

Where the wind doesn’t seek to knock us down,

But instead catches us in its updrafts.

And I hope that you will think of me,

And know that even shooting stars,

Have somewhere to come home to.

"Sinning" together.

I wrote this on August 1, 2011. I don't remember writing it, but I wrote it back when I was more full of rage and less complacent, and I like it quite a lot.

I don't mean to disappoint you
or your beloved god almighty,
and I know that you claim to
"Love the sinner, hate the sin,"
but quite frankly, I've never
believed love to be a sin,
and though fornication is frowned upon
in some random section of your holy book,
I can't help that my neighbor's wife covets me
and well...I like the way she tastes,
and how she moves,
and how she smiles,
even when she is doing something
as simple as doing the dishes,
walking, dancing, sleeping,
but I especially love the way she moves
when we move together,
and how she giggles,
whispers, yells,
because...we move well together.
Your book also tells me not to lay with a woman
as I may with a man, but damn
laying with her feels better than any man has,
and it feels even better to love her,
so if this is me sinning, then
I will gladly burn in hell with her
beside, over, under, on, with
me.

Home

Perhaps it is the sound of my mother's laughter at late night talk shows after I've gone to bed,
or memories of whimsical ponytails and naps in oversized beanbags,
late night jam sessions, Top Ramen, Oreos, and Def Jam Poetry marathons,
but I miss whatever the feeling of 'being at home' was before
I began to wander emptily and aimlessly around hoping
that I could grasp onto something or someone for long enough
to bring back the warmth that accompanies feeling safe,
but instead I've landed in a place I've never been before
surrounded by my own cynicism and self-doubt,
And as I lay here during nights of insomnia,
feeling as though each of life's mishaps are both miracles and tragedies,
that propel me to work harder but ground me so firmly in reality
that I've forgotten what it feels like to dream.
I hope that my internal battles and my indecisiveness
will rock me to sleep each night until memories of
home become present feelings, and I can truly acknowledge
that my brain is a home to my thoughts,
my life is a home for my potential,
and home is not nearly as far away as it seems.