poem: Wax on Wax off

(okay...so when me and my friends compete at poetry competitions in chicago, we constantly feel like people judge us cause we're from evanston and they act like we have nothing to say. so this is what i think about that?"

You look at me, corneas heavily fixated on

black clothes, stud belts, chuck tailors, a silver pentacle, and more rings than I have fingers. Before you even open your mouth your body language

screams in outrage that I look as if I have been white washed by suburbia.

But if I looked at you and judged you based on your consumerist habits called “style”,

could I call you tainted black?

Dipped died in pools of darkness, allowed to believe

spending more money on clothing than your own

educational advancement is perfectly acceptable.

Anybody not like you and black is obviously a freak of nature!

I look in the mirror and laugh at how badly

I once wanted to be the typical black girl.

Desiring to be a person more concerned

with their hair, nail, clothing, purses,

and shoes than anything else in the world.

I wanted to be a god fearing person

preaching the bastardization of Christianity

inflicting intolerance and the promise

of purgatory on all those who held different beliefs.

In the dawn of a new era, however

I have come to realize

what you preach as religion is what I call a theological atrocity

and it’s scarring me how our own people are being

bred generation after generation to inflict oppression

Forgetting that not long ago we were the oppressed.

Despite the series of unfortunate encounters

With people who hold your judgment of black suburban kids

I stand taller than ever before

thanking a goddess that ignorance didn’t get the better of me.

Because what you call style is what I call pathetic

the myths you accept as truth is what I call blissful ignorance,

the black noir you call great reading is what I call unintelligent drivel

Had you not spent all your money on your appearance

as if Snoop Dog is going to sweep you up to be another video ho

you could have bought some Walker, Hurston, Morrison, or Lorde

and invested in something that’s promising versus grossly idiotic!

So you can sit there in your chair and judge me on what you think I am,

but remember no matter how white washed I may appear to be

this Wiccan vegetarian feminist gothic-punk woman of color has been

white washed by suburbia to be your mental superior.

its been a while

its been a while since i posted....so i feel the need to update the world

1. me and my first girlfriend broke up. she cheated on me with the girl she's currently in love with. big surprise in the back of my mind, but it hurt none the less.
2. I've been on a journey within myself to try and heal. and its been interesting. I've shed a lot of silent tears and definitely spent moments looking out into lake Michigan hoping for the answer.
3. i've fallen for somebody else...and i'm enjoying every minute of it

invisible emotions

its been ages since i truly expressed how i felt about things......its been ages since i put pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard for that matter. I've been so tired, the one emotion i don't feel the need to hide from the world. everything that's not positive gets corked in the bottle of emotions because I'm afraid of loosing control, spiraling over the edge and not caring how or why i got there. I'm holding myself together through wires, thin wires which are slowly unraveling. kinda like cello strings almost. i just miss certain things in my life which i used to enjoy. i miss my cello, my dance classes, my art classes. i miss the things that used to give me some joy, yet at the same time i ruined them for myself because i was afraid i wasn't any good.
ah....what is long lost always seems out of reach.

what my mother doesn't know

my mother doesn't know that when tear ducts are overfilled
its because i'm fighting not to cry. i'm holding back, retaining more water than a pregnant woman, only because i'm afraid of getting those looks that pretty much say
"why can't you be tough like me?
why do you cry all the time?
why haven't you grown some crocodile skin like i have?
i didn't cry this much when i was a kid and i had BIGGER problems than you did."
yes mom, i'm aware that you had bigger problems than i did. i know that body image and self esteem don't even compare to dealing with racism of the 1950s.
but that doesn't mean belittle me, make me feel smaller than i already do. reduce me to a state of incoherent babble and stupidity, i'll be okay.
don't tell me not to cry, i dont tell you not to be cold to me, not to be incapable of showing emotions. i don't bark at you "SMILE! cause i'm sick of seeing your tar stained frown!"
is it so hard to hug me when i'm feeling sad? is it so hard to take five minutes to try to understand me, and bare with me when i'm not making any sense.
if you don't want to be let it to my world, say it now, so that in my adult years i'll know not to depend on you.
why not just say you never wanted to emotionally connect to me? it'd would have been an easier fall then trying to climb the mountain of getting you to understand only to plumit thousands of feet into a bank of cold snow.
i've never been able to say what i feel, but i'm saying it now:
you've never been able to show emotion, you've never been able to look me in the eyes and tell me you love me, i'm sick of wanting you to show affection your not capable of.
is it so hard to hold me when i cry, wipe my tears from my face, hold my hand?
do you really wanna know the reason why i want to move out so damn badly, its to be around people who wont make me feel small for showing emotion. people who understand that crying, screaming, shaking with anger and fear is NOT A WEAKNESS!!
you can watch people in the movies show emotion and its beautiful, but you can't even look me in the eye and say "I LOVE YOU!!!"
from this point on, i won't obstain physically from others who need affection, and if i wind up being unable to show affection to my own children, i'll put you in the worst home in creation, as the powers of the heavens as my witness!

the art of my body

my body
the canvas
composed of modernism
subtle touches of post impressionism,
ladened with thick black lines to define
where the mold begins
and brown skin flows freely to its end.
above lay breasts, ripe as grapefruits,
leading to a waist line
eager to taste
fine antidotes of rhythm
colliding with flamenco beats
swirling to the melody
are hips of a sinuousness nature
these hips embody the erotic being within
a genie who breaks free from the bondage
of a bottle and lets her amorphous
form billow in the breeze. these are
child rearing, bike steering, sometimes even god fearing
kind of hips.
these are earth shaking
love making
back breaking
do you feel your head board quaking
kind of hips!
mine are
soul shocking
bed rocking
goes beyond boots knocking
kind of hips.

and past my hips
deep within
the cavern of my thighs
lies
the mysteries of the universe.

lemons dont make lemonade alone

when life hands you lemons...you're suppose to make lemonade....but what happens when life fails to hand you the sugar and rain down a little water just so that you aren't squeezing lemon juice into your mouth and flinching at the bitter taste.

well great creator in the sky...I've got my lemons...in fact..i've got a barrel of them wedged in between my bookshelves...i'm really in need of some sugar....something sweet to happen in my life...cause right now with all the drama surrounding my friends i keep getting sent more lemons...maybe its not just me...maybe everyone is getting lots of lemons like i am...so the really gay and happy thing to do would be to make one big ole jar of lemonade....it would kinda be like a walgreens commercial..where life hands you everything you need..but life isn't like that!

i understand that to an extent...this is just one of those moments where i wish life was a walgreens commercial...except with more racial and sexual orientation diversity!

The State of the Black Union

(this is something i wrote, a performance piece so to speak,being a queer womyn of color, analyzing her race's current situation. WARNING : It criticizes black people, points out our flaws, and makes subtle references to our current politicians such as Jesse Jackson. Not obama though...i love him!)

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to perfection. This report is coming to you from the suburbs, reported merely by an outsider looking in. Now usually how these things have gone down is, I, being the speaker will try to appeal to your need to feel like justice hasn’t been served to you; the man has been putting you down for years and doesn’t have your best interest at heart. My sentences that rhyme are suppose to dance inside of your eardrum until your dizzy with the glee that knowing that someone has finally heard your plea, answered your prayer, a disciple of God has finally decided to pick up the other end of the phone. The following statement would be true if I were conventional, a politician hungry for the food that is a voting ballot to fill my proverbial plate. Yet I’m not a politician, I’m merely an educated black woman who’s fed up with the progress of her race.

I walk through the hallways of my school and I wonder how we have fallen when our predecessors spent their lives trying to bring us up from the oppression of which our race was born into. It still feels like the shackles of slavery are weighing me down when I read books about the academic state of our children. We are, as of 2007, officially left behind. Our children cannot read the required high school material, compose the majority of the regular or below level English courses, cannot do the math, nor score decently on state or national examinations. Our solution for bridging the gap; give them books meant for 6^th graders and below relating to their similar socio-economic situations, and hope to god that when the time rolls around for them to read Dickens or Chaucer they are equipped to handle the work. When that falls through the cracks we implement African American literature, which doesn’t seem like a bad idea at first, it’s only until later we realize most curriculums are euro-centric and trying to appease the need of a student not to read the literature of a “dead white guy” is enforcing a fallacy of reality. I no longer want to be one of four black people in an English honors class, one of three in an advanced placement humanities class, and one of ten black people in an astronomy class that actually pays attention. The denominator for the following fractions needs to be increased so that we can finally begin to fit into the equation that represents American education as a whole.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to appease the aesthetic eye. This report is coming to you from the center of a free aids clinic, where the majority of the people waiting idly in chairs for their test results are black people, our sisters; our heterosexual woman who are getting infected at a larger rate than any other minority population in the United States of America. And while our women are getting infected, our clergymen sit back and continue to tell us that AIDS is a gay white man’s persuasion, and to get it would mean not only have you engaged contact with our racial enemy, but began a tango with the devil of homosexuality only repentance and prayer can cure. Regardless of the information out there, our women, our men, and our children are still dying from this pandemic, because we as a people turn a blind eye. Our only cable channel, meant for the sole purpose of “black entertainment” even cuts off the wrap it up commercials, because obviously advertising Baby Phat will erase all the red ribbons that are pinned to our chests. The length of your artificial appendages called nails, the labels you have tattooed somewhere below the waistline of your pants, the way you “rock your hips” to a song; anything advertised to get the minority to be a consumer will not be your 99.9% guaranteed protection that a condom would. The Juicy Couture, the Rocawear, the Phat Farm, the Jordan’s, and the many other brands aimed at minorities will only be a mere token of your ignorance if and when you do catch this disease, because somewhere along the line, fashion became more important than safe sex.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to cover up the poverty that is afflicting us, the welfare that is constricting us, and the consumer mentality that fuels our desire to be apart of the American dream. We’re still living in the ghettos designated for us during the creation of “white suburbia”, and while some of us have managed to climb to the mountaintop and infiltrate the land of white picket fences and apple pies at windowsills, we are still calling government allotted properties not fit for roaches to live in our “home sweet home.” The violence in these areas increases more than the number of schools or parks for our children to play in. Businesses trying toe establish themselves to have an ethnic clientèle pack up and leave as soon as the shot of a gun rings louder than a house doorbell. Instead of being recruited to be girl and boy scouts, our children are being recruited to sell drugs, be gangsters, and hustle their lives away. Now something deep down in my gut is telling me that Martin Luther King didn’t have a dream for his people to still be living in squalor, not be able to afford school supplies for their children, be grossly unemployed compared to other minority groups, and have drug affiliations larger than the number of African Americans attending college. I know that racism still runs deep, but you would think with anti discrimination laws in place, a black person could work somewhere other than Mc Donalds or a check cashing joint, actually go to college, or be in a position to support themselves and not be on welfare. Even those who have a job aren’t better off because we’re still tempted to have the latest item on the market, it is a thing that afflicts all Americans, but rarely do I see a white person trying to use a link card to pay a cell phone bill. And if we can afford cell phones, why do our kids come to school with not even the granite to make a pencil to their name? Its time we had another great migration, not geographically, but in our priorities regarding what’s truly essential and what’s a materialistic desire.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to look like the American dream, but the black reality.