line breaks at the end are effed up due to the column design on my blog but you get the picture.

Revolutionary Love
{Reprise}
Inspired by the poem Revolutionary Love by Amiri Baraka

Black Revolutionary Man
in love w/Revolution
a quest to find her
Black revolutionary man
look in simple places:
the canopy of breath
cradling the small of her
spine, each vertebrae,
each whispered confession
tucked between thighs
Black revolutionary man
you know already how to love
her gentle in battle and struggle
and spirit every earthly creation
testified on your skin
birthed of her womb
Black revolutionary man
were you to rise her body
a trellis, yours a vine
i’d learn you how to cry
a king, great king you know already
how to love even in dearth
of tears we are emotion, we are
the tide: the ebb and the knot
slaves not known to humanity
servants only to the moon
Black revolutionary man
were you mine i’d call you
Malcolm, Martin, Dilla, Marcus, Tupac, Marley, Amiri, Obama,
pyramid -grazing the easterly horizon in all your wisdom – Muhammad
peace be upon him, Dwayne
who works the next block and Moses who works the corner,
Allah, Bhudda, Jesus, Krishna, avtar – dancing
mischief and other unwelcome blessings – i’d call you
to denounce all titles, abolish your servitude
call you equal, brotha, son, boy, prince,
Ayti, Afrikville, New Orleans, Nile, Mecca, Detroit, i’d call you
the richness of soil, the nourishment of night,
the knowledge of universe Black
Revolutionary Man, my kingdom
i’d call you
only
the moon.

1. i’m fighting cliches here. love poems with out cliches are hard; sometimes i like the cliches. what do you think?
2. i could see myself reading this. out loud, with people, maybe on a stage or with a mic or neither or both. tell me what you think about the sonics of the poem.
3. anything else?

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within proximity
the ocular mimes surgeon.
dissects each instance: the castle,
the sand, the endings
the granule. the shimmer:
the reflection of glass
shards, the moisture; every tiny element
commanding adherence.

now from a lighthouse my gaze
an indiscriminate paint
brush bare-breasted and flush
fingering the horizon, the sea girl nested
amongst cobra tendrils misshapen
salt water locks, the green tide, grey dank beach.

a myriad of
soliloquies on
perception.

1. What is this poem trying to say, if anything, and does it matter?
2. How does the punctuation work for you?
3. What is your unfiltered initial reaction to the poem?

Phyrecracker

By the time September 2008 came around i was exhausted by the social and romantic aftermath of the summer heat. In Detroit, after a long winter and early spring hibernation the entire young and fertile population ventures into the public sphere at the first sign of outdoor music festivals to subsequently torture each other sealed with kisses, fingertips and sultry gazes. But i digress… by September of 2008 i was ready to write for the simple reason that the page seemed less likely to cause humiliation and heart break. As any seasoned writer will tell you, this assumption quickly proved patently false but, again, that’s a digression.

Since by the time Autumn 2008 rolled in on a crisp breeze i was hungry to write even in spite of experiencing a complete dearth in inspiration, i used submission guidelines as a surrogate to writing prompts and joined an online writing workshop. i’m at a point now where i seek out calls for submission that fit a poem i already have or, in more rare cases, a poem that i want to write. But back then, while i was doing more digging into what kind of poetry i was interested in writing and what i was looking to get out of the writing process, submitting to particular journals that had specific guidelines was helpful. i also like playing with forms and it makes it easier for me to write when i have a goal or structure that i’m aspiring toward as opposed to free form.

i was looking for a niche and different journals that i was interested in finding a home for my poetry for, so Calyx Journal’s call for ekphrasis poetry prompted me to write a poem to submit.  For the record, i would not recommend this approach of writing one poem in response to a call for submissions as a good strategy to actually getting published. A wise person once told me that when submitting to journals you should always submit the maximum number of poems allowed, if possible, because they will generally choose one of your least favorites to actually publish. Don’t ask me to tell you why this rings true, but it does, and this is how things panned out for me anyway.

Ekphrasis is an art form that comments, describes, reacts to another art form. At the time i was thinking about ancestoral history, reading Hafiz, mourning loss of understanding. So i wrote about Proverbs and promptly missed the submission deadline. i wrote something that, at the time, i felt was ready for publication but, in hindsight, was merely a preliminary draft. There’s no shame in admitting this. Editting and working with a poem means putting in enough effort that gets it as close as possible to it’s truest potential as a piece of art. It’s more than cliche to say that a poem is never finished. Here’s the original draft of the poem that was originally titled: In Praise of Proverbs.

i worked with the poem for a few months, submitted it here and there, made revisions/edits/additions. Eventually the poem looked completely different than the one i endeavored to submit to Calyx. i was over the minimalistic wisdom of Hafiz (or as much as i could possibly get over it, anyway) and aimed to fill out with more of a narrative.

One day, in the process of editing the poem, which by now was called simply “Proverb”, for my work sample submission to VONA, i centered the entire poem on the page for no particular reason other than it feeling it right. Yet another wise person who so graciously agreed to look over my VONA submission asked me why did i center the poem on the page. She said she asked this question not to tell me that the poem should not be centered on the page, rather, she thought that it should be done with intention. So, why is it centered on the page? It’s an important question to ask yourself.

There was something about the weight of it in the center of the page, the space it created on the page… the shape of it. And that was the trigger. The “shape of it” suggested a concrete poem. Concrete poems are also called visual poems, because the visual manifestation of the poem lends something to the intended meaning of the poem. i would argue that most if not all good poetry gains meaning from it’s visual presentation, but in the case of a concrete poem this meaning is more intentional.

This is when the staring began. i stared at the poem until my eyes stung, teared up, dulled and watered, obscured the specificity of the words. It looked like an exclaimation mark but the poem didn’t exclaim anything. Ultimately i was questioning and being questioned in the context of the poem.

And that’s when it happened. The words grew stilty legs and danced themselves rearranged into a curvacious question mark flaunted on the center of the page. Or at least that’s how i like to remember it. Complete and as a close to perfection as my corny writing style would allow. At that momment it became insignificant whether the poem would get me into VONA, which was a happy circumstance since it only got me shortlisted for the workshop. It became totally unimportant whether the poem, one of my least favorite poems ever, actually got published.

It wasn’t soon after that “Proverb” got published. You can read it in the latest issue of Diverse Voices Quarterly for the low, low, price of downloading the PDF. Then get started writing a poem of your own that makes you not care if you ever get published.

i am not a great poet but i got some hustle. i got some focus, i got some grind, i gots this swagger. i’m conceited, i got a reason.

A wise person told me that it’s not the most talented artist that makes it, talent helps, but ultimately it’s your willingness to market yourself as the second coming of Black Jesus (now i’m paraphrasing) that gets you in a position of visibility and credibility.

If you’re like me, you might be thinking: “that’s pretty fucked up.” And yeah, you’re right, it’s oppressive and FUCKED up that artistic success isn’t a meritocracy.

If you’re like me, you might want to view it from the flip-side too though: The success you want as an artist is largely, not entirely but LARGELY, subject to YOUR power to envision this success for yourself. i treat myself like the brilliant artist that i aspire to be thereby making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. You dig?

If you’re like me, you are an overachiever who needs to practice patience in progressing toward a vision. After making a commitment approximately a year ago to take myself seriously as a writer, modest accomplishment have begun to trickle in over the last month and a clear sense of how to move forward is emerging. In this series of of blog posts i want to share this process of growing and moving with the work product, with the words and with the artist within.

Check it:

My poetry published for the very first time ever:

Diverse Voices Quarterly “Proverb”, pg. 61

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