Writings

There is a weight to this world,
a cruel, familiar fog called poverty,
not just in the pocket,
but in the very marrow of one’s vision.
Television sells it to me in high-definition:
grief in glossy packaging,
violence wrapped in laughter,
misery mistaken for entertainment.

Despair,
it is loud.
Like the damn phone ringing again,
not with opportunity,
but more bad news,
more of the same.
My home,
if you can call it that,
ain’t quiet anymore,
just silent.

I sit in this low-ceiling room,
where the air don’t move,
and the past crawls up the walls.
Loneliness has made itself at home,
my only consistent guest.
Tragedy?
She doesn’t knock.
She wears a scent you never forget.
You know it once it’s in the room.
You feel it behind your eyes.

I taste pain now,
it’s bitter, yes,
but familiar.
Like old wine turned to vinegar.
Depression hangs on my face like a wet rag,
and my heart,
well, what’s left of it,
torn.
Tired.
Frayed at the edges.
My senses dull from the constant battering:
the shouting, the sirens,
the quiet weeping I pretend not to hear.

Negativity wears a name tag in this place.
Stability?
That’s fiction.
Gravity ain't just physical,
it’s social, historical.
It drags us down,
pulls us under.
Every day rains.
And not once have I seen the sun.

The violence is no longer shocking.
It’s routine.
The bodies pile up.
Mutilation is news for a minute,
then forgotten.
And I...
I reach for one last breath,
not because I want to live,
but because death might finally answer.

But what would my end be?
Will I trade this hell for another?
Will I burn for daring to feel too deeply?
Or will God... if He is listening,
send someone,
just someone,
to touch my hand,
to tell me I'm not alone?
To say that love; true, fearless, burning love
ain’t extinct?

I weep in the night.
All night.
You hear me?
All night.
Not out of weakness,
but exhaustion.
This world has teeth.
And I’ve been chewed on long enough.

My tears don’t fall,
they flood.
They drown any stray dream I’ve got left.
Repression, depression,
they ain’t just conditions.
They are oceans.
Deep.
Cold.
Unforgiving.

Every time I reach for hope,
I am slapped by memory.
By history.
By a system that was never designed
to let me live freely,
let alone imagine.

So now I ask;
what is a man?
Is he a product of his scars?
Of the neighborhood that chokes him?
Or of the dreams that still somehow live
beneath the rubble?

Will I ever move mountains with these hands?
Will my words matter?
Or will I remain a ghost,
wandering the margins of a society
that claims to be just
but never has been?

My community?
Tattered.
Not broken because we’re flawed,
but because we were targeted.
Weep if you must.
I have.
Still do.

Our stories,
our roots,
ripped from us like weeds
by folks who feared how deep they ran.
So now we wander.
Unmoored.
Asking God and time and country:
Why?

I have no hand to hold.
Only fists I can barely lift.
And yet,
I wait for the light.
I long for it.
Even if I’ve never seen it,
even if it’s a myth.

My mind is a locked room.
No door.
No window.
No floor warm enough for bare feet.
And I wonder...
can you even see me?
Would you want to be me?

I am not your charity.
I am not your cautionary tale.
I am a question,
bold, black, breathing.
Searching.
Always searching.
Not for riches.
For release.

If even a flicker appeared,
just a hint of light,
far off...
I would chase it
through hell and back.

And if someone would,
light the match,
be the spark,
maybe, just maybe,
we could burn.
Burn down the lie.
Ignite the truth.
Light up the corners of our minds
where dreams are hiding.

Let me see what I was meant to be
before this world told me no.

Let me create.
Let me imagine.
Let me remember.

I want to persist.
To resist.
To rebuild my senses
and tear down every fence they built to keep me in.
I want to discover what lies behind this gray sky.

Even now,
with nothing left but breath,
I fight.
Because somewhere deep in my bones,
older than pain,
older than America,
there is a flicker.
A whisper.
A light.

There comes a time
when a man stops pretending.
When the laughter of the crowd
no longer sounds like music,
but like mourning
for a truth they never dared to meet.

It does not make me a genius
to see what others don’t.
It makes me dangerous.
Because the moment you begin to see,
you begin to unravel the world.

Awareness is a weapon,
and the world is built on sleep.
They do not forgive you
for waking up.

They call it arrogance to think.
They call it weak to love peace.
They call it madness to tell the truth
without trembling.

But I have seen enough
to know that blindness
is not innocence.
It is fear wearing a friendly mask.

And I…
I have no use for masks.

“The menu is not the meal,”
and I am hungry for what is real.
I will not starve on symbols,
or praise shadows for light.
I have learned the taste of truth,
and though it burns,
it feeds me.

When I first began to see,
it was not beautiful.
It was not holy.
It was chaos.

I saw the fakeness in smiles,
the tremor in every lie.
I saw men worshiping their own reflections
and calling it success.
I saw women breaking themselves
to fit the shape of someone else’s comfort.

I saw the world,
and it broke my heart.

But broken hearts see clearer
than blind ones.

I tried to explain…
but how do you explain water
to a fish that’s never left the tank?
How do you describe freedom
to those who think cages are normal?

Awakening is not peace.
It is a tearing.
The self you thought you were
begins to crumble,
and the one beneath
has no name.

I learned:
once you see,
you cannot unsee.
You cannot return
to the smallness of pretending.
You cannot laugh at fake jokes,
or kneel before false gods.

You walk alone,
but free.

People fear freedom
because it mirrors their chains.

When I stopped complaining,
they lost their partner in gossip.
When I stopped seeking approval,
they lost their power.
When I started living with purpose,
they lost their excuse.

They called it pride
when I refused to crawl.
I also realized that they will call you crazy
because you refuse to dream their dream.

But the truth does not bow,
and I am done kneeling.

I learned to stop fighting the river.
To flow.

“Trying to define yourself,”
they say,
“is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

So I let go of the need
to fix what will not see itself.
I am not here to convert the blind.
I am here to bear witness.

To see deeply,
and not drown.
To laugh in the madness,
and still love in the ruin.

That is my rebellion.
That is my joy.

There is a danger in depth.
If you stare too long
into what is false,
you may forget how to feel.

Awareness can turn to sorrow
if you hold it too tightly.
The world becomes a play
you no longer wish to act in,
and yet,
you are still on stage.

“Man suffers only because
he takes seriously
what the gods made for fun.”

So I learned to laugh again.
To taste the small mercies,
a child’s laughter,
music that saves your soul,
the silence between storms.

The mind that sees everything
must also learn to rest.
Mine does.

There are days
when my clarity isolates me.
When my peace feels like exile.
When I speak and the room grows quiet
because the truth is heavy.

But I am not lonely.
I am simply beyond pretending.

I have no need for approval
from a world still asleep.
Let them call me cold.
Let them call me distant.
They do not know
that this distance is my prayer,
a space where my spirit can breathe.

I stay grounded in the simple.
I read.
I think.
I laugh.
I touch the earth
to remember where I came from.

I do not wear enlightenment like a crown.
I wear it like skin,
ordinary,
but unshakable.

When I see lies, I speak truth.
When I see emptiness, I fill it.
When I see suffering, I build.

Wisdom is not an escape.
It is the courage
to walk through the fire
without losing your tenderness.

Even though awareness hurts,
blindness would kill me.
Ignorance feels warm,
but it burns the soul from within.

To see is to suffer,
yes,
but to see
is also to live.

When I finally saw the illusion for what it was,
I laughed.
Not because it was funny,
but because I was free.

Now I move through this world
like water…
calm,
powerful,
unapologetically alive.

Seeing what others don’t
makes me different.
But it makes me real.

And in a world built on performance,
to be real
is the greatest act of defiance there is.

I am not crazy for being awake.
I am not arrogant for being unafraid.
I am simply alive
in a society that mistakes sleep for safety.

“You are the universe
experiencing itself.”

And so I walk,
bare-souled and unhidden,
knowing the eyes through which I see
are the universe
learning to recognize itself again.

They call me strange.
They call me too deep.
But I smile,
because they are reacting
to a truth they haven’t yet remembered.

I was never meant to blend in.
I was meant to burn through the fog,
to name the lies,
to love the world
without surrendering to its madness.

And when the night grows too long,
I remember…

I do not fear the light.
I am the light.
And even when the world refuses to see,
I will keep shining,
quietly,
furiously,
free.

Look at us.
Look at what they’ve done,
and what we’ve become trying to survive it.
Our people,
not broken, no,
but scattered, searching.
And so it falls to me,
this quiet and terrible responsibility,
to remember.

To take us back... not out of nostalgia,
but necessity.
Back to the days when we only had “yes” or “no.”
Black or white.
No comfort of gray, no mask of maybes.
Just the raw nerve of what we felt,
and the courage to show it.

But time,
that cunning architect,
changed everything.

I tried to speak,
tried to lift up the weary and disillusioned,
tried to tell them:
You are not what they’ve named you.
That we are more,
that we have been more,
and we will be more.

I believed we could be a mirror
held to a world that refuses to see us,
proof that we fought.
Not just with fists,
but with soul.
With the invisible strength
they never knew we had.

Because they taught us to hate our reflection.
Taught us that our imagination was a danger,
something to be locked away,
a threat in brown skin.
And they closed the door tight.

But somewhere,
somewhere in that locked room,
there was a light.
A light that bled.
That sacrificed.
That rose on a cross not just for Sunday sermons,
but for us,
right here,
trying to make sense of this mess.

And still I ask,
how can I be that light
in a land that gorges itself on shadows?

Can I really make a difference?
Will I have the strength to stand
when so many before me have been buried
for trying?

All I have are my stories.
My pain.
My lessons.

But if I tell them,
if I say:
Yes, I was broken,
Yes, I was drowning,
But somehow... by some grace... I made it through…
maybe the ones still underwater
will begin to believe.

Because joy,
real joy,
comes not from escape,
but from the fight.
From standing up, again and again,
when history keeps trying to knock you down.

No, I will not be a statistic.
I am not the sum of my zip code.
Freedom is not a fantasy.
It’s a choice.
A rebellion.
A fire in the bones.

And here I am,
body strong,
spirit still healing,
pen trembling with truth.

Trying to make sense of a lifetime
in one breath,
in one line.
Trying to find time
to finally let my light shine,
not to forget the darkness,
but to use it.

To carve a path between
what is earthly and what is divine.
To speak something holy
out of everything I’ve survived.

And maybe, just maybe,
all I’ll ever need
are these words.