Book Release - The Dredlocks Tree

My second book.

This time my poetry. Some ninety and change pieces that I mostly kept in my garage.

Open mics /
booksignings coming up in October and November but in the meantime, here are two excerpts--




Black man scared

White people don’t bother me
Black folks do
What with our tendency
To cling to dirty laundry
And post-slavery psychosis
We’ll sell videos of a pop star peeing on a minor
Rather than questioning
What makes that singer pop, in the first place?
It’s a wonder how we survive
All the atrocities we define ourselves by
When it’s the refusal to choose brotha over nigga
That helps gentrification lose its shock appeal
It’s simply not enough to use economics
As a reason to stay behind in the runnings
Not when sisterhood and masculinity
Are based on questionable pride
You pull at one end while I pull right back
And we do this dance of take and take
Until neither of us remembers their spirit
Preferring to answer to cattle calls
Rather than naming the cattle for what it is—
The worse kind of confinement
Where we hate ourselves so much
That we mistake rape for culture
And platnum wigs for status
Like climbing a dredlocks tree
But calling it shrub.


For us

In this place
This sacred place
We held so dear to our hearts
And in our collective consciousness
This bothered ground we called our home;
Our reason to fight and fight again
All in the name of Pan African salvation
We stand in truth
Having resolved our struggle with the pale one
And with one another
To now simply be
Each of us
Doing what we were called to do
As dedication to the promise
Those before us had made
Before relinquishing their very last breaths
To aborted uprisings and public castrations

In this here place
With our hands clutched together
Bowing our heads
As we call upon those who await us
For the renewal of our plight
We so lovingly give homage to
This borrowed soil
On which we’ve chosen
As our point of reference
Without division of any kind
But with the conviction of one force
One people
One objective
Together
In the name of spiritual egression

It is at this moment
That we make the decision
To return to our most basic of rituals
Uninterrupted
As in before captivity and social buffoonery
To look on and ahead
Without the meaning of ‘I’

That this day
We begin at the end
At the beginning again
Our heels fixed firmly
In our agreement to transition
Having learned from our past
Leaving behind the chains that once defined us
And lift our heads towards the All Knowing
To finally
Once and for all
After being forced to despise our own
As we sing the praise of justice and forever
Give the sign
Then disappear.

Photo of sunrise by Morisset




The Dredlocks Tree can also be purchased on-line at amazon.com Feel free to leave a comment or request for orders and guest engagements