This is a new poem, a true poem, a message straight through and through poem, and like
all messages I write for people, like people who own people, I own them.
Because nothing says I'm standing naked for the world to decide on, like the raw and uncharted
new poem.
These words are my slaves.
Are you uncomfortable yet?
I'll whip them and beat them and mold them, hold them and make them do my bidding, I'll
auction off words like live and love as if they were sheep in a stable, an unstable stable
of unwilling sheep.
Who am I kidding?
By sheep I mean people because sleep comes slow to the guilty, and I'm not guilty for
who I am.
I'm guilty by proxy, but these words, how else can I get these words to believe me?
Doing these words for your own good words, but these words don't comply, they defeat
me.
See, my grandpa was a racist asshole, and I'd love to say what did he know, but he knew
how to work and he knew how to love my grandmother and was a politician, so as a child I looked
up to him, then later in life refused him, and because he was an asshole to people he
struggled with being disowned.
Now I'm owned by these words, by the struggle handed down by my father, whose father and
grandfather handed down shame because they thought they were in some way better than
another man and all women, and now I endeavor with words to explain, I am not my father
or grandfather, I am not my father's grandfather, I am not the mistakes that they made, I am
change, I can change, I am better in this way, yet these words bring nothing but pain.
Unless I redress, let these words live in love with them, let these words be who they
are and let them come and learn from them, let them pour out their knowledge like how
a man is supposed to be in 2016, if I feed them and heed them they'll allow me to be
them and lead me to true understanding.
I am not my privileged white lineage, I'm me, openly, I've welcomed all humans, women
and men of all races, I've worked to earn given my word to continue to learn from the
mistakes that I've made, and I'm bad with names but I'm good with faces because they're
all so beautiful when you catch what they're saying, like songs about love heard by broken-hearted
children it's in them, not what's on them.
I love these words who forgive me for being a poet, I'm so grateful for these words who
shine the light in front of me like a star in a hallway that shatters a doorway that
bursts to a walkway that twists through a forest of words that bring me to truth.
So this is a new poem, and I love all of you poem, a poem about words and how they taught
me to live, a poem about not being owned, about cutting the noose from my family tree
and making a change from my family home and raising my children to be able to live in
a world that they've made with the words that they say because children are the authors
of creation.
Some say it's the struggle that makes a poet but I know it isn't the struggle, it's the
words that I choose to live with, so this is a new poem, and I love all of you poem,
a poem about words and how they taught me to live, a poem about not being owned.
