May 29, 2007

Openfloodgate.com

Check out OpenFloodgate, a new web site that allows you to publish your work instantly. Add your own stories, poems, articles, scripts, books, lyrics, slides, and photos, and check out the cool creations others have published on the site. http://www.openfloodgate.com

One more for you...

Urbis.com

Urbis is a creative community with three types of users: creative people, those who love and support creative people, and those who have opportunities for creative people. It's very creative.

http://www.urbis.com/

Okay folks, think MySpace for writers, poets, essayists, playwrights etc... Check it out, you wordsmiths.

May 26, 2007

~Middle school ~

Forgotten like socks
Underneath teenage beds my existence lied hidden from my eyes
In grade six
Until Caucasian lips
Forced poetry into lesson plans
Witch then forced my mix hands
To feed words onto blue lines
Giving me the freedom to regurgitate memories for a grade
Dried tears lied in the middle of note books and these note books became my own history books because in grade seven it became apparent that
Yellow skin does not have a section in social studies text books
Suicide thoughts came from pen points like thunder in a rain storm
I drew my scars with pried only to hide the pain I felt
Then I fell for a stuttering slam poet
Whose poetry never stuttered and if it did
Well poetry taught me how to look past that
Funny how our eyes only met between stanzas
Poetry helped our hands meet in every line brake
I carved memories of a beautiful mistress on lose leaf
Verbally drew salted water falls on scrap paper
And fought bipolar battles with ink

I have written my auto biography
Not up to now but up to last night

September 7, 2006
the first day of 8th grade came 4 years to soon

See I wasn’t ready to be all grown up but time waits for no one
So sitting alone in a class room filled with familiar faces I found myself
Internally tripping over the words
Witch fell from the same Caucasian lips that forced poetry to spill from my finger tips in grade six

See this year we would be slam poets
Not myspace fiends
Not tempted to tag a cutie on tagged
Or give our faces to face book
We would be slam poets
I’m not talking about that snap your fingers after I perform my poem type poet
I’m talking about that stomp your feet scream
Clap your hands type poet



So we had to step our game up
And we did
We lied until our clothes were stained
Freed innocent fairy tales from juvenile jails
Found children who didn’t complain
And after this we
Had the munchies for some true friends because we only had a few
And this hunger
This hunger
Brought my mind back to those young days when I didn’t know what I was living for
When the only writing I did was neatly folded and passed
By middle school hands
From notes to note books I watched my pen do back flips on peal pages stories of how
Daddy became father were woven in to pages of
Poetry
Blades kissed wrist leaving stained like red lipstick on unfaithful coalers
And I wrote until mommy couldn’t find her first born anymore
Because she was covered by
Verbs
Nouns
Adjectives
Metaphors
Similes
Haikus and sonnets
I drowned my self in poetic
Thoughts and it was beautiful
I mean it was pure ecstasy
No need to roll blunts
Just roll ball point pens on paper and smoke poetry become
Poetically high and have the munchies
To update your vocabulary
Poetry allowed me to revisit memories
Four stanzas ago
I was 3 all over again
And when tears fell from my eyes pregnant with
Disappointment poetry was standing by holding a box of tissues
From being my
Enemy
To my best friend
From a male voice telling me a poem existed
To me actually giving birth to premature words
Poetry left scratches on the walls of my womb
So now even I
Celebrate mother’s day
Poetry helped me recreate my own reflection and made my finger prints match my personality
This was the foundation of staying sane
See some how
Sanity and poetry coincided when it came to me

When it came to me poetry
Touched my soul like the cries from
Abandoned bellies
And you know what
poetry is the reason I don’t stress over the fact that I can’t fit into
A size 0
See no matter how big I get a pen
Will always fit between
My thumb and index finger
Figured
Never would I have figured that
The purpose that was once forgotten like socks underneath teenage beds
Would’ve been found in middle school
Note books

May 20, 2007

Quoted from K-Swift and UrbanWord NYC, pass this along fervently!

New York City youth aged 14-21 are needed to fill out a quick online opinion poll about NYC public schools.

This ain't no mayor's survey- it was created by youth to ask other youth about the real deal on schooling in NYC. Speak up and contribute to a redesign of the NYC school system at www.ncscatfordham.org/surveywiz

Why do we have to compete for things that we actually have rights to in our schools?
Why is it that I know the changes that need to be made in my school but the power to make these changes is totally out of my hands?

Since January 2007, the Youth Researchers for a New Education System have been working together to do research on school control and the purpose of schooling.
Part of a larger city-wide effort to redesign schools to be based on human rights, this participatory action research project seeks to understand what schools would look like if they were about collaboration, not control and competition.

Our goal is to get 1000 surveys completed by May 30th, 2007- and you can help! Just pass this link on to every NYC based youth, teacher, youth organizer/educator and parent you know! And don’t forget to check out www.ncscatfordham.org/surveywiz

For more information, contact the Youth Researchers for a New Education
System at yrnes07@gmail.com

May 13, 2007

I Remember...

I remember riding my horse, Lady-M bareback, losing myself in the imaginations of an 11 year old boy. I’m a cowboy! YEE-Hawwww! Until Giddey-up showed me what real cowboys face…

I remember standing, solemnly watching as my mother’s brown Toyota Celica’s tires swirled up dirt cyclones as she drove the expanse of our dusty gravel driveway, and I prayed she’d return from work soon…

I remember huddled in a crevice in her room, how my sister stared at me with those Disney eyes, as we tried not to listen to my mothers harrowing cries…

I remember being rewarded by my father for my heroism as I sailed through the air, my leaf like body batted by his branch coming to a dead rest as my fragile back puckered a whole in the drywall of the master’s bedroom…

I remember my mother packing…

I remember watching my mother’s tears as we tried unsuccessfully to stab open a can of soup with a knife, the second time I saw her cry, since newly separated from my father, we still didn’t own a can opener…

I remember the sweet taste of steer meat, ketchup and tomatoes, American and Swiss cheese on my burger; and I remember the first time my mother cooked up store bought beef…and I remember becoming a vegetarian…

I remember not having to go to a park to see leafy trees and green grass, not worrying about arriving early enough to get a spot or throwing a football over broken bottle glass…

I remember when shiny new grills meant a burnt burger stuck to the barbecue…

I remember as a little black boy in predominately suburban Midwest Wisconsin when Yo! MTV raps meant Heavy D was Mount Vernon, Krs-One the Bronx; in fact I remember when the only BX I knew had an M in the middle, and usually left my child ashy legs with severely skinned shins and bruised knees…

I remember when driving south through Chicago, radio stations played songs about fighting the power, struggles with the cops, and breaking free of restrictive chains, instead of snap rapping, leaning and shaking and how low those chains hang, when Self Destruction gave way to self-indulgence and We Are The World became We Fly High, …ballin’…

I remember elementary school art class when the teacher actually told the class to use peach for people’s skin, when my burnt sienna didn’t fit in…

I remember when wireless simply meant cordless, broadband was the piece of purple rubber holding together broccoli stalks I chased and popped my sister with, and cable, cable was the wire that connected the antennae to our uhf/vhf TV. I remember being the remote control; in fact, I kinda remember rabbit-ears, tin-foil and locking pliers…

I remember when the Olsen twins were babies on Full House, Michael J. Fox only attended political rallies on his fictional sitcom and both Mr. and Mrs. Superman hadn’t met up with kryptonite…

I remember when the only Elmo I knew was the name of a fire in a movie about some high school kids doing detention, and there were barely six, six resident’s on Sesame Street. Ah Ah Ah…

May 11, 2007

Burial

As my hand slowly moves across this empty paper
The same paper that moved so many people
That gripped their attention, dispensing them of all desires and wants
Those made my lines seem like fists
Cautious thoughts, became dangerous
And same unstable topics became the center of gossip
This empty graveyard that holds my buried poetry
I am indeed afraid of this graveyard, that’s why I don’t visit the dead
Instead it is time for me to look past the past
I’ll savor the memories, what ever would last because in my mind
I was a fine poet; no one could ever tell me other wise
But I can’t hold it, though it hurts me to know that all good things must come to an end


I sit back, reminiscing to all this shit I would be missing
Flipping through archives of poetry, with all kinds of poetry
But this eulogy is tearing me in two, to choose a fate between what is and what was
What is now dead, but what was once life
My life
My soul
I hold this pen, which now becomes my shovel….
I write my fate as I erase my past
No longer taking the same path anymore
My journey has come to an end
My final burial is here
Tears of final thoughts dripping and vanishing
Quickly splashing on this patch of dirt


This casket is closing in on me
How couldn’t I see, that I brought this fate upon me
I hold my breath to savor the life I had
I throw my lifelines away
Lowering my past into a coffin into the ditch that I made
I do not write any more
Because I don’t have any more tears
Because my rays of inspiration were never really there
I’m not a writer anymore, that’s dead now
It’s gone, only to haunt my pages of former words that still dwindles in the fire
And that’s the meaning of a ghostwriter
I’m still scared of what my future holds
I know what was, is not what is
But what would happen if what was is in my what is?
I can’t cope with memories, because it brings back what kills…..


I sit back in my chair
Still staring at my empty paper just like 3 minutes ago
Still staring at my burial
Still staring at my graveyard
Still staring at this shovel, that has dug my hole
Still waiting….
Till my last breath takes me away
At least for while, just a few months
Still waiting….
Patiently, till I can get my life together
Poetry is dead; I am doing this for the better
Nevertheless, I am not to be underestimated
A poet that has done his job 100 times over deserves a break
But now this is it for me

Mr. Prolific Poet
2005-2007

May You Rest In Peace…

~Still is SlamFam for Life~

~I Miss You~