The Angry Poem

I, am an angry poem,

Beware, I might jump off the page 

and with a tightly curled fist wallop you in the gut too.

or I might spray my molten heat all over you.

I am a black man after all, you probably expect no more.

concentrated genetic fury from slave block to jim crow.

People like you would imprison us still

making sure we don't access the fullness of our wild hearts

For me, anger has always been radioactive.

Uppity people who look like me get put down, permanently.

Perhaps that's why its always been easier to hurt than to hurt.

To be black in any family is to know anger, but not always how to hold it.

You may talk of fighting anti-blackness 

but you are snake-like in your poison planted words

deceptive, plotting, traitorous.

You do not fool me with you empty platitudes 

and honey-laced toxic whisperings

I see you for who you are.

And if there is any power in this angry poem at all

in the first encounter with it or the twentieth,

it will be in its power to DESTROY.

but not like an atomic bomb or a vicious slur

no, this explosion melts all boundaries

reduces the aggrieved and the aggriever

into their interdependent primordial essence 

transformed.

no blame exists here

just the raw ingredients 

of pure potential bathed

in compassion's building blocks. 

Belonging

Perhaps it all just wants to belong,

to be seen for what we are, 

to be known for the fact that by,

improbable odds we even exist.

Love comes back to collect all things

to know itself in all things.

Life as a game of peek-a-boo.

It seeks all the shadowy parts, 

all the parts that feel they have no home,

that may fear being seen. 

I "see you"

What if more than anything 

those parts simply want to be seen, heard, felt,

from the ache in your arthritic knees

to the calla lilly in the vase 

to the unforgivable act committed against you, 

by you, for you, in your name.

How a quivering heart would oscillate

if it was all seen; the sublime in it's majesty

to the unfathomably grotesque

just different nomenclatures for 

Lila

in it's all encompassing magnificence.