Originally posted July 2018
No one speaks loudly anymore of the continuous death tolls, the poor educational systems, the conditions of our ghettos. The number of males who have been bred to grace the walls of penitentiaries around this country has been ignored. We step in the monstrous feces that plague our culture, ignore the smell, while we choke on acceptance. We continue existing within a cycle that seems interminable in its death and destruction. When pockets of resistance have tried to disrupt this genocidal structure, they have been claimed into the frame of martyrs. Those who suffer through failure of recognition preach muted words of unity and growth. Syllables that have broken through have landed on death ears. We have screamed more for revolutions than we have for resolutions. Mirrors held for faces that have been decorated and disguised from what is true beneath the muck of coerced identities. Leaving inimical adolescents to find themselves lost in the maze that is their own egos. Ghettoes flooded with mind altering drugs, where liquor is found easier than proper education funding. Ignorance is not bliss; it’s as deadly as a mouth full of anthrax washed down with a cup of acid. As we sit and rap away our sorrows and struggles, glorifying our independent contentment to our unconscious competence. Conditioning our future generations to become failures before they even have a chance to live. Half-truth told, accepted as law, we find ourselves wondering who we are and what is expected of us. This is while we waste away, behind state and government funded warehouses for men. Our women are left to work twelve and sixteen hour jobs to support our children and themselves. Creating dysfunction in the solitude that the child finds while mamma is out working and daddy, (Who is that?) isn’t even mentioned. Our existence is more than the struggle against “The Man”; our struggle resides in our selves. Only we’re able to shed the mask that we now have agreed to wear. Then, when we face the world as individuals who know themselves, who have reclaimed their identities and culture, then, once those mental shackles have been abolished, we can stand proudly and say “yes we can!” With the actions of those who know and have fortitude to lead our culture out of this dismal project, we can change what has been to what it should be. Destroying this nefarious cycle that in itself is covert slavery, we truly will be free with the death of this elephant named Cycle.