The following post is short and sweet. The Black Power Mixtapes stands as an important piece of film because of its revealing of precious revolutionary history. Angela Davis speaks in this clip about what violence is and how Black militants view the subject. She makes the essential point that we must understand what the term truly means. Is property destruction (breaking a Footlocker window) during political rebellions violence? Is fighting back against the fascist police violence? Is stealing from a corporate store violence? Davis answers “no”. These acts, which are usually so quickly pointed out by the liberals and conservatives as acts of deviance and destruction are reactions to a systemic injustice. They are reactions to the true violence of the society.

Black folk have been the subject of Capitalism’s dehumanizing violence from our initial encounters with the West. Violence is the ghetto, the slave trade, the police state, inadequate schools, the prison system, the courts, welfare, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, homophobia, unhealthy foods, a lack of nature in your surroundings, the demeaning and degrading of all that your culture admires, being trapped behind cement walls and green shades. Those things are violent acts. So when we talk about what violence is, it is important to remind ourselves of the entire picture. The entire scope.

My body,

growing slender like lost shapes

and paradigms

dirtied slacks, rusted basons, and worn tools.

It’s left the old parts on the hillside to lay amongst the mocking eyes.

Watching.

They are an audience -conspiracy- and I am a leper on display.

My body,

growing cold- empty like shells.

Allowing fingers to trace itself in an infinite darkness.

Stretching out snatches of skin.

Crying.

This body,

growing old like dust tracks.

Was once a not so sacred shack.

Opened like lips before trembling. Abused. Unloved.

Touched frequently and turned over in soiled hands.

My body,

left alone like an awful chill.

Singing to itself, trying to rouse warmth from the ebony shrouds.

Happy Birthday Marlon. Rest In Power.

Mama’s smile has wings

and her arms- warmth.

She’d make sure our water always had sugar and that the stench of poverty never sat on our clothes too unevenly.

She tried to build us with blocks of her own making-

Trust and confidence,

love and faith,

endurance,

strength,

pride and self worth.

Mama sat hiding crack pipes and upturned bottles

Throwing all the nasty bits behind the couch where she thought we didn’t see them.

Sending us floating on smiles.

Mama’s love set foreign standards on our project block

She meant it to carry on . . .

But you can’t make love real for another’s heart.

No more than you can stop the passing sands

And mama’s love can over carry over only so much into the world without her.

There comes a time where us got to find our own.

And grow in it for ourselves.

And you should never mistake the intimacy that comes at the start.

The feelings moving about between moist flesh

and the thoughts dancing about like wonder

The quiet on his face.

Id wish to reshape it-

the space, touch his face and rest.

But sometimes smiles can mean other thangs

and a kiss can be empty.

Love like there is in this world misleads.

Misinforms.

And mistreats.

Leaves you alone and believin’ friends to be lovers and lovers to be eternal

and so on and so on.

I found my love in my wash bason.

Clinging to dirt, reaching for me.

I took a rag and wrapped it.

Whispered to it.

Held it.

Read it for what it was and placed it down.

Talked it off the ledge it was on, in my room.

Amongst all the misfortune and patriarchy.

In my heart theres a space for hope to land.

Dig roots and lead.

And theres a place for my love to breathe.

Move past the manipulation and define itself for itself.

Something like a resolution came about as I went to sleep.

A promise to do better with ourselves.

To teach others how to treat us through how we treat ourselves.

To be able to stand to them and say:

“I am the somebody I want to love”

Some calm . . .

setting like sun done come upon me

as I find pieces of myself that were kept away for birthdays, family gatherings, and first dates.

They lie tucked under the bath house bed.

My palm, pressed to skin, feels like solace and I feel still

Laying transfixed, still. . .

My eyes find some man being fucked, violently

His head bent low.

and I saw you laying parallel.

Playing majorette with a couple of torn heart-strings.

Twirling about with some other man’s ruined symphony.

You blew smoke- thick like illusion – and sang of worlds where we weren’t prey for White men eager to waste salt on our endings.

Some part of me sat with you back when food was homemade and basons were bath tubs and we laughed at uncle Floyd’s missing teeth

and dirt roads that no one can drive on

and night’s out and even crack pipes

and we laughed.

And thought on how ghetto life seemed easy compared to this numb terror.

Still . . .

Barely understood thoughts: gold bands and dark skin

Sarah Bartman

melon patches

mule bone

Hurston and Hughes.

gin joints

spades tables

grandma’s hands

reconstruction

a month of Sundays

Loretta

pale skin and Betty Gene

South Carolina

insertion and pain

bleeding at the start

black balls

white dolls

and minstrel shows

money shots, towels and still . . .

we all lay under some White man’s gaze.

Martina Davis-Correia, the sister of Troy Davis, has passed on. I remember having the opportunity to hear her speak of her brother’s trail and conviction while she was on the freedom road, attempting to get Troy off death row. Something in her eyes and voice resonated deep within me. This womyn spent the last years of her life, as she battled illness, trying to undo the wrong of this Capitalist system. Moments before Troy was executed I saw Martina get in front of news cameras and declare that “the old South will not rise again”. The pure fierceness and unrelenting passion, which echo’d so many powerful Black womyn in my life, touched me. Her passing is a great loss. Please take some time in your day to remember this womyn. Bourgeois history may forget her, as it does with many of our warriors, but her spirit lives in us. Her life carries in ours and her fight continues with ours. Till the wheels fall off. Till this system falls down. A luta continua!

Our Lives, For Martina

Our lives speak soul afro progression

Music

Pain

Suffering

Whips

Gin joints

Sin joints

Spinners

High tops

Righteous fists

And grits

Cats howling at the moon over broken Colt bottles.

The sweet rhythms of the Delta.

And the rough ones in the boogie.

Shake shacks and the state hunting us.

They speak of a justice not yet seen.

And imprisonment behind red, blue and white bars.

Our lives speak Black.

And sister, our lives speak you.

Selfless and bold.

Forever pressure put on coal.

May your life be light

and your words be felt.

Our lives speak you.

Life is constant transition. Western thought, which seeks immortality and eternal wealth for the individual, opposes transition and change because it posits a dissonance with the very universe as opposed to a healthy praxis that seeks peace with the ebbs and flows of existence. Recently, I was hurt very deeply by a good friend. And though I have visions of community with this person in the future, in the moment I am hurt and angry. When I woke up this morning I looked at the “Healing Words Freewrite” and drew inspiration from it. Here is what came about:

“Healing Words”

Im serching for some healing words

Some kind of soul tinged piece of loving to rouse me in the morning

Some kind of faint comfort whispered in my ear.

Some joy wrapped sunlight

or mama’s laughter bottled.

I want some healing words that stick to your ribs

move and inspire you.

Help transcend beyond strife and transgression.

Yea. . .

at this moment some healing words would be nice.

What is the life of a young Black boy lost worth to the society? What is the social price of the Negro lived experience? How are we remembered?

The specter of the prison system and society ambivalence to my plight as a Black male has always followed me. I grew up watching my grandfather battle white gentrifiers over everything on our, formerly all Black, street. I grew up fatherless because he had 22 years of his life stolen from him by the State via the prison industrial complex. My cousin, as brown and as bold as he was, found himself facing the inside of a cell for fighting a police officer that spit on his face. These three men and their experiences with the White power structure of the State shaped my understanding and fear. We are demonized and oppressed on various levels.

Recently, a childhood friend of mine was found shot to death on a corner. When the bourgeois press gets there his pockets will be searched for drugs, his person for weapons and his life for any narrative deemed good enough to vilify him. When we leave this planet, it is often without sympathy for the hell that we suffered through here due to this poisonous system. This poem is for him. We are beautiful. We shine like coal pressed. Our lives are important and precious and worth honor. All of us.

I Hope You Had A Good Day

In remembrance of high top fades

and scratched up Jays

and crack mothers hollering at the top of their lungs

and Wedsdays filled with forced Bible study sessions.

In remembrance of you I speak this poem.

Being Black ain’t easy when life is like this.

We who been through hell and mud

sweat and exploitation.

steel shackles and watching the colored only discos burn down.

We who breathe life rhythm into music

bass

a cool blue in the fields of the Delta

and fish fries.

We stand here crafting our lives out of this given nothingness.

On corners flanked by able-bodied men.

In kitchens decorated with the help.

Picket signs and pigs

pin-stripes and pot handles

bus boycotts, crack and the failure of the Panthers all wrought a now like this.

I remember small specs of dirt covering the red in your hair.

And the way you smiled.

Some small laugh covered in congestion and a slight optimism.

Standing like the first fall of snow

or mama’s voice on good mornings. . .

both rarities in our lives.

Wrapped in shrouds made of dreams

and the mockery of freedom flags.

I remember a laying of hands guiding us to shore in Summer.

Forever fields and a life filled with wonder

Not corners, stalked by death, where we fight and fall

Where images of how our childhoods use to be dance about on gin bottles and coke cans.

Begging us to be reality

Got a text that said they found you dead

Bleeding out and alone.

No harder words were read.

No one deserves to die alone.

How now can I explain the current movings of Earth and thought?

How life was with you and the falling of grey

This poem closes with a something often sought.

Like shaping of the very clay

I hope you had a nice day.

I know I haven’t written on this here blog in a long time and I apologize for that. Serious things in my life arose and I cannot control that. I can however choose how I would like to respond to those things. And I believe that the writing process is apart of the healing process for our lives – and thus apart of the revolutionary project. For me, writing heals the wounds of oppression both personal and political, making me a stronger and more loving person. Which is something revolutionary under White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalist alienation. Here is a free write from this morning, the goal of it being to get out any emotion onto the page:

UNTITLED FREEWRITE:

I touch

parts of parts of you

in darkness

Moving in moonlight

Wrapped like shrouds around the children of peril

And the gloating of the lesser gods forms a smothering circle.

I loved you through a hell storm.

Loved you like southern summers

mule bones, and dirt roads, and harmonicas, and the look on Uncle Floyds face as twilight sets on South Carolina.

Loved you like freedom

revolution and the people

Loved you throughout foreverness

And together I thought of shaping light

and making some new thought with you.

Taking the mud of our lives and transforming it in the service of truth

. . . and ourselves

finding homes that feel like mama’s heart beat

and solice

and anything but now

where life hurts.

Where words cut.

Where darkness doesn’t just reference the sun.

More thoughts later. I am too upset right now.