Peaches [inspired from "Four Women" by Nina Simone]

Her beat up kicks break beats down the pavement
Even her last name is proof of enslavement

Meet Peaches

Running from herself cuz she’s never been free
she’s just a model in a dissonant myth
a single word describes her ancestors and the people they came with

but black isn’t a race it’s a product of class
these races keep us separated in the same caste
people misdirect their hatred
and free trade freedom for minks
they say she’s homegrown American but they missin a crucial link
use a can like a mic to tell people to think
reminds the world she’s unique in the blackest of ink

her mind is a broken color scheme
and a beat so cacophonic
philosophy and energy vying to hop up on it
the sound of the people makes her motivation phonic
and the din would be ethereal if it wasn’t electronic
but
In her sleep the visions are violent
they fast forward and press play behind her eyelids
sometimes she feels like a forfeited person, lifeless
or just unfeeling,
she
worshipped the sun too long and now her soul is peeling
but she’s more than a child of the star

Peaches was raised in the mean

suspended between two vices
verbal reminders of her parents’ sacrifices
she was close to the block but lived in 3 worlds-
an Escher lithograph
bumpin The Doors, The Coup and Teddy Pendergrass

they tried to keep her immune to the struggle while locked in a cage
took honors courses and watched her first cousin die of AIDS.
fuck the accolades
the guilt will kill you if you slack
try to pause and make the world stop spinnin on this wax
some people blame the jockey but
there’s no dj in control
to place the blame on God is to deny your soul its role
can it be that apathy begs more than gold as its tax?
this life cannot be explained through a used collection of lies and facts
and those who find release deep in a beat or in a sack
know the needle in the sky always selects the saddest tracks…

to be continued/edited.

(my attempt at) senryū...

• for (my dog) Pochi.

obese Pochiko
your gaze framed in blackest kohl
flown in from Egypt

• um.
  

she thinks love is like
the sweetest peanut butter,
nuts make him sick

• hatchets and hatcheries.

the wildest Bass is
genetically weaker
than my pocket knife

• por l'arbre (in front of outhous...)

20 non-violent leaves
gathered in your tall belly,
my reason to smile

• home.

salmon heads floating
in a black cast-iron pot
my dad, a freegan?

single.

who me? single? well, i'll be the first to let you know that my status is, well, it's complicated. you see, i'm in love with this phenomenon called Language. we something like eloped one evening between the folds of the dead sea scrolls in catacombs of onion skin leaflets and the red ochre on ancient scriptures buried in caves that still stains my fingertips. we share a bond rooted so deeply in time's fleshy embrace that classical languages begin to merge with extinct syntax and give birth to something like pillow talk, Gullah, AND gibberish had a love child and named it "our love". ..and yet there are those who scoff, those living in lust, who cannot understand. they laugh "oh yeah? well you can't exactly kiss language...". those are the same people who argue over he and she, she and she, you and me but all I’m thinking is we. and i usually don't entertain such basenes, but if you must know, sensuality is a language unto itself... and the love i speak of cannot be partitioned. there is no seperation defining the physical or the meta, there is only a fusion that occured at the moment of our commitment. only an inate understanding so vicsreal and hanging like mercenary prepositions... both raw and refined... thus enabling us to see through the same i's, be aroused at the same q's, and even cross the same t's... still trying to understand? i told you, it's complicated. its got a lot to do with time and circles and time and circles and beats. yeah. beats... if need be, i'll put this testimonial on vinyl and we’ll call it "wax poetics". we'll spin that shit foreward and back and scratch on it so many times that the rythmes will begin to come in glottal stops and mandarin tones, you'll either sway and bounce to it or roll your r's in envy as Language and i bob our head to breakbeats and blue note samples. Music is my language or maybe my muse is my music helping my tongue find vocation in this life. Allowing my soul to shout. Rhythms and concepts modulate meaning and intimacy as we make our music to an endless ostinato of communication both spoken and felt and felt and felt. We live in time and circles and beats together where seconds begin to fatten until minutes can no longer maintain and give way to a spilling over of hyperbole and notes to poems never written, they tell me that, I am the daughter of griots and scribes, and kin to mc’s so before you ask me if I’m single take a moment to ponder the ramifications of spittin game to a chick whose less into your dick than your dictionary.