}. Can you see the speckled gecko playing hide & seek. Who would relate to one another using those tastes as their foundation. Show me some identification : and we pull out the sun. Poetry is the space wherein the facts we learn through true study and understanding of self can perform as archetypes and symbols and syncopation, so that these hard facts are easier to bear, but it is not a space we should use to escape the facts of our essence or our condition. For years researches had been trying to clone the cells of white men and women, and failing. Votes: 1. We earn our continued oppression day by day, labor for it. Vincent Allen Vicente-Manuel Mar 2017 I am a broken man. If you ignore what happens to your body, what is happening to black bodies everywhere, your poems will ignore you back and lack the resonance we need from them to free ourselves or become our true selves again. Is it going to give me a free tuition to go to school? 5:30 came and went without the sound of a familiar rattle from outside the door that came from my mothers keys. When you are sick, or made sick by circumstance, food only deepens the illness, and codes itself with the suffering one is enduring while eating, becomes about emotions more than nourishment, and negative, desperate emotions at that, the opposite of its purpose in nature. The thing about facing your fears head on is it only really works on TV. Why are we destiny? Sniffing up the ol’ oak tree              after the acorns you squirreled awayfor the fam when the market was healthy. Which is why the mummies were missing. Light and sound are our first nutrients and all true food and water is just different densities and frequencies of light and sound translated into electromagnetic energy and given form and lifeforce by its own unique dynamic between electricity and magnetism. How do you expect to write effective poetry from outside of yourself, always gazing on your own spirit as ‘other’ and looking for ways to contain it with art as opposed to using this cryptic and encrypted English language to liberate the spirit? POETRY DAILYMS 3E44400 University DriveFairfax, VA 22030, Poetry DailyMS 3E44400 University DriveFairfax, VA 22030, The thing about facing your fears head on, is it only really works on TV. The UVB rays needed to melinate bodies and to produce adequate amounts of vitamin D only hit North America (with the exception of Florida, Georgia, and Southern California) between April to September, from 11:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon, and are only absorbed if you are 60 percent naked in those places at those times, and not overly calcified with dairy and other toxins. Damn great great great great great great grandma you was slaving on them fields. It’s easy to turn Griots into madmen. We’re just faking out master, so we can get him or her off the land, so that they can go get us some help so we can break free from the plantation. In order to patent a semi biological substance, it must derive from cloned not original cells, so yet another form of free labor was born in this transaction. Just as we cannot allow ourselves to forget, or be naive enough to think that anything offered us by this society is benevolent, from the 13th amendment, with its hideous exception, to the so-called ‘good job’ that has us inside all day degrading our light-processing engines, we also cannot ignore what ails or controls our bodies, from the new curfew renewed every time we mobilize to protest state violence, to the comfort food addiction renewed with every collective trauma, to trap beats we twerk to over Henny under dimmed fluorescent lights and Future’s intoxicating timbre, to the church pews we kneel on to worship white Jesus. They ate them all. After having been abducted and transported across the Atlantic at manifold angles and velocities, and upon arrival on the auction block and then at the miserable slave quarters on their respective plantations, African men and women refused to eat the food they were given by their cannibal captors. Head to head, bird to, nest, I’m saying I understand what steers our national, stasis, our fossilized political animals, & I, forgive us. Square any beef  between two parties& you’ll find money lurking somewhere              near the root. resembles one psychedelic mushroom patch. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email (required) (Address never made public) Name (required) Website. Of evil & fear,Aristotle claimed, pain arises              from the untoward bracing.He strikes me as a particularly              anxious dude. Life is s p l e n d i d! As in              reality, the narrative’s of little consequence.But peep the plot-twist ending:              Marques, our handsome protagonistattorney (stay with me),              wins a class action suitto the tune of lifetime therapy              for everybody. Because we know what life is. Author, Blogger, and Poet from Landover, Maryland. Is it going to get my fam out of jail for something that has been legalized? My fear of history is a valid fear              of  Power—stripped, lorded over, misguided—corrupting one’s sense              of need in favor of excess. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. It was only after distorting the contents of scripture, which instructs to only eat the flesh of animals, and only the animals who are herbivores themselves “the clean animals” in times of flood, famine, or dire need, it was only after converting slaves to Christianity and linking the religion with the West’s putrid dietary habits, that slave masters managed to create a race of primarily flesh and starch eating slaves whose thinking would often reflect those misguided tastes. This poem was written after the historical reparations agreement was signed by Israel and Germany. Head to head, bird tonest, I’m saying I understand what steers our national              stasis, our fossilized political animals, & Iforgive us. Normativity will not save us. If Congress was serious about reparations - in '93 and '94 the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, and not one single Republican vote was needed for reparations. & I bet,the last thing you need is a group of  hairy              climbers, & their many-legged offspring,ogling your property. Reparations (Poem) K. Exum February 24, 2020 September 7, 2020 Poems. Reparations, I believe, are talked about for political reasons, trying to cater for the purpose of getting votes. In the Fear Factor versionof this midlife episode, Ludacris is like              Man, white people are crazy.In reality, this sounds like a frightful fucking              headache, six ibuprofen & stitches.Like 80,000 eyeballs all up in your situation,              if you catch my drift. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Reparations: Damn great great great great great great grandma you was slaving on them fields . We know that this planet is not our home, nor this country, that we are diaspora here, and that on every level we are the custodians nonetheless. Would we worry, or zombie a little less, or invent more verbs, or honor the restlessness lurking in our performed domesticity; if we knew we were involuntary participants in a grand and oh-so-fatalistic suicide culture that began with black bodies as capital/ real estate, and fantasizes about ending there or in a carefully disguised eternal return we name entertainment, sports, mass incarceration—would we opt out or go harder? Our poetry must become ruthless as we ruthlessly deploy our bodies to rectify our situation/ship with the Western gaze. She teaches us that voodoo was used as a means, during slavery, for slaves to break free from the slave master. ( Log Out /  ( Log Out /  display: none; ( Log Out /  As in. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. reality, the narrative’s of little consequence. But what does any of this have to do with poetry? In the process of all of this pandering, we have often used language as a tool to access the few token spaces for us to supposedly ‘prosper’ in the western world, rather than training the language to obey us, we have proven that we can be tamed and undermined by it. My fear of history is a valid fear, of  Power—stripped, lorded over, misguided—, of need in favor of excess. View all posts by K. Exum. Scraps of dead animal flesh, meals of blood and starch, were bitterly, indifferently, refused. They ate them all. Decades later the adulteration of Lacks’s body was acknowledged first by Morehouse College and then by additional institutions. J. C. Watts I came at this topic with a full explanation in Let’s Talk About It: Slave Reparations, if you would fully like to hear me out. Photo: Rubbie Hodge. Come On and Bring On the Reparations – Def Poetry – Sekou Sundiata Share this: Twitter; Facebook; Like this: Like Loading... Related. Is it going to give me a free tuition to go to school? Although it’s still early my vote is with Bernie. Last night i got to thinking about where I loved you most and why i couldn't show it constantly. But how do we remain that present without putting our bodies in danger or under scrutiny in order to reclaim their richest language? The grammar of blackness in the West must be ruthlessly examined from within, on a cellular, molecular level, and reconfigured, if we are to move from signifying the tragic and soulful beauty of an oppressed group of electric spirits, to signifying the triumph of organic power and talent over the weaker but much more evil force that has been out to contain and exploit it for centuries. We know that blackness is just condensed light and that every nigga is a star © Kendrick Lamar by way of Boris Gardner. Post navigation. I also did this as a video on my Instagram if you want to check it out. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Today’s poems need to break up rigged thought patterns rather than look for new ways to restate and validate them, and today’s black poets and all who love us, must master our bodies and their histories the way soldiers do, for our words must be directed toward saving the souls these vessels carry from suffering the fate of monopoly capitalism into fascism and back into barbarism; that’s the trajectory we are on if we remain mere witnesses, if we remain abstract to ourselves. After her cell line, deemed the Immortal Cell Line, was successfully cloned in 1955, its traces became staples in cosmetics, household products, and all areas of medical research.