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© 7 September 2010, The Griot Poet

Country thugs spitting
country grammar trying to
hammer out an existence
while all the while being the
assistants to their systemized
destruction.

Exclaiming “fam” as if to rebuild
the community that used to be
when we didn’t have a reason
to put each other down.

We lost Medgar, Malcolm and Martin
and the vacuum has been filled by
clowns and fools that have
turned Minstrel shows into
their own personal bankrolls!

And like Amway entrepreneurs:
only less than 2% will make it
as a rapper,
baller,
shot caller:
and the rest will die as fools.

Now we insist on saggin’
when the reverse of the
word is the epithet shouted
at most Ku Klux Klan rallies,
now used to show ownership
as if “fam” now owned slaves!

Everybody wants to be a “G”,
when in reality, as much as you
admire 50 cent or Jay Z’s music:
you wouldn’t get past their
gated security or make their
exclusive guest lists.

You wouldn’t know how to
pronounce half of what their
master chefs prepped for
the shindig you can only
fantasize being in.

We are 35th in math
and 29th in science,
yet you insist on dropping
science in rhyming spells
you cast,
memorized street diction
instead of
paying attention in class,
flashing sets,
pimping and calling women
what you would FIGHT
another man for calling your mother
(if you’re man enough to defend her).

Education used to be the
“secular god” of the black community,
yet I went to school with your
parents and sampled abuse
for being less than obtuse
by being called “white boy.”

Technology became my
comfort and toys as
I worked like Steve Erkel,
to prove my worth in a field
that many like William Shockley*
used Eugenics to say we
weren’t worth it or
could not work in it!

We’re letting the world dictate to
us what being us means.

As long as we play along with the
presiding cool thugger themes,
we don’t present a threat to
the status quo that’s finding itself
superseded by people that
don’t worship the God we know.

As long as you drag your pants
below your waist,
you’re practicing for the
prison-industrial-complex
in which you will
eventually participate.

The thirteenth amendment states:
“S1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.
S2: Congress shall have power to enforce
this article by appropriate legislation.”

Your voting rights, your wealth, and
your health,
your manhood:

GONE in a fortnight of error!

Because:

Country thugs spitting
country grammar trying to
hammer out an existence while all
the while being the assistants to their
systemized destruction eventually
become what they behave and speak,
Flip-the-script on “saggin’” and see the
Jedi mind trick of which I speak of and
reverse the curse:

pull the pants up!

* William Shockley: Statements about populations and genetics.

Ode to Sinclair Lewis

© 4 September 2010, The Griot Poet

Sinclair Lewis said: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

I am at a loss that his prose was prophetic…

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of “I have a dream,” Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin inaugurated a scheme of what previously had been the gathering steam of the lunatic right-wing fringe also known as the Tea Party, swiping Martin’s noble dream from the auspices of 1963, when we HAD no Civil Rights when we HAD no voting rights, totally using his niece in a public relations piece/peace effort…dismissing the plight of generations denied basic human rights and stating that “blacks don’t own Dr. King.” Well…we never tried.

The purveyor of fringe hate radio, recovering alcoholic and drug addict, twice dropped out of college and seeks to dispense his brand of knowledge online…for a (for him) prosperous fee.

A previous runner-up beauty queen, a college graduate that took a trip through five universities for one degree, a brief mayor of Wasilla and a half-term governor of Alaska, now we discover that even her Facebook updates and Tweets are “ghost written” can wink and nod at the camera, lambasting the “lame-stream media” for being sexist and pulls the Jedi mind trick of talking about the same being “impotent and limp” without so much as a demanded apology…because the abused stepchildren of the body politic, more concerned with ratings, sales than truth have lowered their self-esteem below being the critics of obvious lunacy.

Just-in-time for the 2010 elections!

The honor that needs restoring is declaring war against the cradle of civilization: Iraq, or as stated in the Bible, Ur of the Chaldea’s,

The Chaldeans had a high literacy rate the envy of Western nations, and UNDER Saddam despite his previously US financed tyranny had a paid paternity leave policy for up to one year…

Now, bombed back not to the Bill O’Reilly luffa sponge washed Stone Age, but a badlands created of our own lies and making.

The formula to create a fascist state by Jean-Marie Le Pen (from Freedom Fries France): “First, you convince the masses they are in grave danger (Le Pen used immigrants as his boogie men), then you promise to save them.”

Perpetuated in its modern incarnation by the Project for a New American Century: reborn like the Phoenix, or as I like to conclude, gum on civilization’s shoe.

And we will wink and nod, cry and preach ourselves into a weighted tyranny that will be a milestone around our necks. Even Jesus said: “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.”

I am at a loss: Fascism has come to America: wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross!

50th Anniversary Gift

© 28 May 2010, The Griot Poet

On the 50th anniversary of God giving you to me as a gift: we are free, we can proclaim our “year of Jubilee” as scripture professes: 6 years have we toiled as a couple, deflected and wounded by the “fiery darts of the enemy,” with the shield of FAITH; the Sword of the SPIRIT of God and many exit wounds.

It was the thirteenth year of marriage when the enemy came at us like a flood and dissolved your ties to Dell; mine to Motorola. We struggled as black couples are apt to, covering ourselves with sackcloth and ashes; trying to get Elohim’s attention from nebulae and spiral galaxies to our dilemmas. EXACTLY on the 4th anniversary of my beloved father’s death, a day on which I contemplated the madness of life without him; last year suffering the loss of my mother two days before Mother’s Day and a day before the fictional “Mr. Spock” suffered the same loss on Vulcan.

As the head of household, I am the subject of assault by demonic forces that only seek my final death and abortion of my destiny ABBA designed for me to walk in.

But, you prayed for me: when you didn’t even like me or what I was producing. You stayed on the promises even when your flesh felt like leaving. You, like the Angel of the Lord called me “a mighty man of valor,” when as Gideon, I asked God “if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where [are] all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying: 'Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt, but now the LORD has forsaken us and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites.”

Yours was the confidence of ABBA, who said to Gideon: “Go in this might of yours, and you shall save Israel from the hand of the Midianites. Have I not sent you? Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat the Midianites as one man.” (Judges 6:14, 16) I could do no less but proclaim a Daniel fast against Midianites and principalities as one man…yours.

On the 50th anniversary of God giving you to me as a gift: we are free, we can proclaim our “year of Jubilee” as scripture professes: 6 years have we toiled as a couple, deflected and wounded by the “fiery darts of the enemy,” with the shield of FAITH; the Sword of the SPIRIT of God.

And on the seventh year, we WILL be set free. We will leave our Egypt richer than we lived in it, we will be given possessions, granted a release of debt, “for the LORD will greatly bless you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance.” (Deut 15:4)

You have been more precious than rubies.
A Proverbs 31 woman that has taken the byword… from my life: as I stand on my enemy’s neck, Sword drawn in this might of mine uplifted by your prayers of FAITH.


Happy birthday, Cassandra:

Love, Reggie

Miss Me Yet?

© 20 February 2010, The Griot Poet

Miss me yet?

Like a grinning Cheshire cat that WON’T disappear, his jeering face grinning, bending over to look under God-knows-what. His image displayed on billboards and selling out on coffee cups from conservative, tea party Internet hook ups.

Do I miss you, yet?

I did not miss my wife’s layoff or my own and the struggles we’ve had to maintain the semblance of an “American Dream” that doesn’t make me “wanna holla and throw up both my hands” like Marvin said, but scream running into the dark economic night.

Do I miss you yet?

You left me a present after only one year in office: a deficit BEFORE 9/11 after coming into a set up surplus for the first time in generations and it only took you a few months to spend that?

Do I miss you yet?

I thought we were in for change, but… the current Attorney General has been taking “I don’t recall” lessons from Alberto Gonzales as he’s now listed the three torture memo conspirators as suffering from “poor judgment.” After all, we can’t lock them up in prison with weak street creds like that can we?

Do I miss you yet?

It’s amazing that someone can blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma and they look for…the first Arabs they can find and arrest before they attest that it was one of our own: brown-haired, blue-eyed, G.I. Joe American boys that created the death and mess. It reminds me of the dark Thursday a disgruntled country singer set his house on fire, screamed for 3,000 + words on the Internet and turned his plane into another Federal Building in Austin, Texas – the IRS – and this violent act not be called: terrorist?

Do I miss you yet?

You left your so-called photo-op ranch in Waco, Texas for an exclusive cul-de-sac in Dallas that our current President; nor your former Secretary of State nor the current Attorney General would probably not be welcome in – other than as your domestic servants…

What do I miss?

-Gas at $0.98 a gallon.
-Conducting wars with countries that actually attacked us…
-Having a surplus to hand over to our children…
-Jobs, jobs, jobs NOT being outsourced overseas when the need is right here…
-Having more money after my month than month after my money…
-401…what? Retirement: what?

The fact there is a tea party means our educated citizenry (and our democracy) is in danger of extinction.

And the most intelligible sound that your former den of clowns can make is to align themselves with the fringe elements of society that can’t bring them selves to say they are uncomfortable with a black family in the White House coming in the front entrance to sit at the boss’s desk. No, they have to question his citizenship, his state’s status as the 50th star on Old Glory; socialist, communist, terrorist without cracking a single Webster to compare definitions.

And ignorance is gaining ground. As often misquoted from 1984: it is bliss, and let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story line: decry the Recovery Act and show up for the ribbon cutting in your own districts. Debase and take credit. Another Grand Old Party in 2004 labeled that act “flip-flop”, but not when it’s them selves.

As I pull no punches in my spoken word analysis:

Miss YOU yet?

Hell-to-the-nah!

Notes on Haiti

© 18 January 2010, The Griot Poet

Despite Rush Limbaugh’s and Pat Robinson’s insistence:

Haiti as a nation did not pray to Satan for assistance in their war of independence from the French and the most powerful army of its day, led by Napoleon Bonaparte.

After all, Rush and Rev: “The thief comes to kill, steal and destroy.” (John 10:10)

The slaves fought against Louis XIV and his Code Noir, according to certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to their masters: to feed, clothe, and sanctioned corporal punishment, employing brutal methods to instill docility, while ignoring human rights and decency.

Henry Christophe’s personal secretary chronicles the true curse: “Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, and crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?” [1] 

In truth: a one-armed slave named François Mackandal prayed only that the Haitian warriors fight bravely, his association with the occult the result of his knowledge of herbal poisons and remedies and being neither Christian nor Muslim… [2]

So much for Rev and Rush’s command of historical facts and data.

But the Haitian’s insistence on human decency freed them and was the catalyst for the Louisiana Purchase being…so cheap for America’s Manifest Destiny and expansion to Western territories.

They have cousins… in New Orleans.

If there is a curse, it is the result of a system that dehumanizes them and makes light of their deaths. Tears shed more for dogs electrocuted than “bodies marred by dogs and crocodiles, piled in stairwells like logs…floating downstream!” [3]

But that is Haiti and was… New Orleans.

The French insisted that the Haitians pay them reparations for the loss of their former contribution of “free labor”: $21 billion dollars until 1947.

Couple that with a few coups and corrupt governments and you have the recipe to bankrupt a republic... before Richter 7.0. Cubans make landfall and have immediate asylum and Haitians under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations…are turned back!

If there is a curse, it is reciprocity, karma, reaping what you sow: sow mercy and flowers to obtain mercy when the disaster is ours!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti, [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mackandal, [3] “Near the Levy” (author)