Someone's Gone Today

Someone's gone today, left the earth
And here I am, writing this poem

Nothing's changed much, the world's still passing by
Someone's gone today, left the earth

His atoms have been displaced
His existence left to trace

Someone's gone today, left the earth
And here I am, writing this poem.

If I Die Young

If I die young

Lower me into the ground with care

My soul should have left the body by then

But the limbs that guarded me

And the shoulders that made my spine up righted

in self-righteous confidence

Will be honored even in death

If I die young

Check my internals to see if my heart still breathes

and my lungs still expand like the flutter of a butterfly's first flight

My life has ended

But my heart still breathes

Maybe for someone, hanging on the brink of death

 

If I die young 

Wipe my family's tears with a song

I'm in a better place now

I'm in my Lord's arms, rocked by the never-ending lullaby into sleep

Tell my family, that life less body they saw

that's not me, it has never been me

The me had always been cocooned, only for Allah to see 

If I die young

Look up at the sky tonight

and say a little prayer for me

We'll meet again soon, very soon

In the eternal bliss of sunshine.

BLACK INK

Sprayed across my white wall was the blood of the boy they killed, hanging in shiny goblets threatening to break away and drop. Drop all over the red carpet in stabbing never ending rivers. It was ink. It touched my toe, just a fraction of a nail and I saw it was black. Mixed with the tears of the mother who won't, who can't stop crying at the son who smiled and laughed and never hurt anybody. Who would cry when he saw a puppy in pain. The black ink was mixed with the sweat of the father, dripping in oceans of rivers, as he worked hard to enter the dollar into his son's education. But the only dollar he entered was paying the grave digger to dig his child's last haven. A proper goodbye to a death nobody gives a shit about.

And why should they? One less nigga in the world, that's what'll come out of their moths, tongues lolling dangerously in filaments of lies and ignorance. The world is black, blacker than ever. The sky is shining. It is more lighter than the black inkiness they have in their hearts. No one ain't black or white. Deep down inside they're all black and they know it. They lie about it 'cuz they don't wanna be black, just a nigger in a soulless world.

I wish, I just wish I could scrape off everyone's skins and replace ourselves with what makes us humans. Bones and muscles. Nerves and Arteries. The blood rushing at the speed of sound. No one can argue at the colour of each other's blood. We're all red.

These skins, I'll burn 'em, destroy them, delete them. After all, we don't really need them to cover up our feelings. We ourselves cover them up, loading them onto a train leaving for Timbuktu in 15 minutes flat.
Those skins, I can hear them calling. No Black. No White. Just human.

The Dance In The Morning

I woke up to the sound of my alarm bell ringing rhythmic bells of morning

My feet kissed the ground in a touch of surrender, the electricity resounding from the caves within

Today is another day, to hurl the way
through the streets, lost in the sea of faces
So ordinary
Only my colour, beating in resounding waves is compatible
with the rest of me
Dancing through life like a shining sunbeam.

SKIN

When you hear someone say

Yes I have a family

They're great

I have a momma and a pops

and a sister who's always on top

in her class, in the F-A-M-I-L-Y

And there's a grandmother, a thousand feet old

and my pop's sister, who doesn't seem like a sister

More like a best friend

And the circle is completed by a cat

A black cat, ironically

You wonder, what does it mean

To go to a house filled with laughter and joy

To light and blood

mixed into the arteries of ours

Family spelled O-W-N

To own what is yours and never letting go

It is a circle of trust and love

sharing the same last name by the bonds of hemoglobin

stretching the ligaments in the skin

The same skin, worn throughout the centuries that passed us by

When someone cannot remember their great grandparents names

It is indeed a great sorrow

For the people that you call your own

You have somehow forgotten

To leash them onto the string of your amygdala

And remember, try to remember

The mothers that gave birth to a generation

by pain and contracting one second later

Family spelled H-A-N-D-S

Holding each other tightly, curved into a tight bond of Hey, you have my nose

Or her eyes are indeed her dad's

The brownness of the pupil is reflected

By all the people who share

and care, for their futures together

Family spelled W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L

There can never be another

No matter how many times you sit down with people

Of the same skin and talk same talks

But the blood flowing in undercurrents under the century-old skin

can never be replaced

By any other place

Family is spelled M-I-N-E

MICHAEL

Michael
I cannot believe you are gone
I first saw you when I was six
my mind ready to disregard all the infamous chatterings
uttered by the giants in my life
But when my eyes finally laid rest on your skillful skeleton of wonders
I could hardly digest you

It took time, the digestion
You were too large a prodigy to swallow in one gulp
Your limbs, as if dipped in the magical waters would come to life
electrified by the rhythmic motions of your cerebellum
leading your feet to their impossible destination

At that time, my six year old mind was only mature enough to call you an 'American'
What would I have known of the disease that plagued your insides, dissolving the person you were supposed to be
I thought you were ashamed of being black, that you had somehow reduced the melanin in your skin to thin tiny goblets splattered onto the wall as your nose grew thinner and thinner

But I was not convinced
The rugae lining the insides of my stomach knew it was being protected by the fearsome acid in my stomach
But the words 'Vitiligo' seemed to pass in front of my eyes at the speed of light, travelling through the islands of ignorance until these eight letters registered into the grey matter of my brain, exploding at the speed of firing neurons

You were proud to be black, you made us feel proud of ourselves
To have an enigma, the dancing man belong to us
Be one of us

But alas, death beckoned one day and took you for his own
Your music's still here
Your dance moves? Everyone's copying them nowadays
But what made you YOU is somehow lost in the gaps between the silences of your words, forever.

Heart

Yesterday I saw
a pigeon and a crow
sitting on the edge
of my window ledge
in perfect harmony of peace
they continued to enjoy each others
pleasant company
Why can't it be the same with humans?
The beings Allah created to be superior
Our status in the hierarchy is supreme
like the specks of stars glittered in the night sky

Yesterday I saw a black man applying for a job
His skin shining like polished marble with his confident aura
of education and simplicity
His resume, I did look at
was like the earth, whose light the moon steals to light up like a lamp

He did not get the job
His color was noticed, discussed in pieces
It was too dark to read his resume

On Saturday, I saw a beautiful black woman ask for a doughnut
And the man looked at her and went
"Sorry, we're all out"
And I could spy seven  doughnuts all ready to be bought and eaten
The woman took out some money and said," Look I can pay for a single doughnut "
And the man looked at her money and shook his head
in a perfect symmetry of discrimination and prejudice

Today I saw a lady, carrying her first child in her belly
like a proud woman with a full hammock
A black man asked for some money
To which she shook her head in a perfect symmetry of racial hate
I could imagine that woman thinking, my child is going to become a surgeon
Or a lawyer or a famous writer
Oh, how I wanted to shake her up and tell her
Lady, if you keep doing what you just did
Your child is going to become a racist
who will break someones heart someday just like
you broke that poor black man's heart

The pigeon and the crow
are still sitting
on the edge of my ledge
in great triangles of yins and yangs
They are not fighting
nor are they judging
They are animals, as some may sneer
Above all our indecent idiosyncrasies
If we could get an X-ray of a racist
I'm sure it would be seen black and carcinogenic
with the malignancy of hate
And no matter how much chemo you give to this cancer patient
The days of cure are way behind him