Saturday, February 22, 2014
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New Poems by Karima Sphere "IN THE CRATES AND IN THE WIND" (excerpt 1)
4///
Icon: Revising In the Dark
Dedicated to Lucille Clifton
Midnight over me
Car lights in face
Yet you claim to not see me
Needing me for your money
And your Quota
Incenses surround my personal space
And nobody knows my
sadness.
Emergency!!!
Somebody call the cops on this crazy fool!
On this crazy fad
On this crazy color
Everybody trying to be like me
like black is a seasonal color
We are people
Not T-shirts
Icon stopped for no damn reason
But he must have done something
Deviant
Labeled deviant, at birth
Look at me
Really, look at me
Know me
Change…
Even Arthur Ashe was Black Listed
Bad Ass Black Male
Bad intention presumed.
See me as I am
Taken from my land
Taken from my momma’s
Blown away from knowing
Me.
Incense ease my pain
I see signs
Failure they say…
I see signs
Forget them who say I will fail
Icon…Yield black man
No right during school
This world with its color code
Too black…
Not black enough
Too much melanin
Downgrading me,
Yet you want to sell my shadow
Prices pasted on my forehead.
It’s hip to talk black
Walk black
Jive black, wear black
With a little white collar
White collars make us
Look successful
Is it the way we lean in our Lexus
that says, we doing okay?
When you think of me…
Think Ebony Golden Chocolate Almond-dipped,
beautiful
And that’s not like I had to write it down
to know it.
5///
The Beatnik
Dedicated to Penn Station, Baltimore
“The 60’s
Years of Hope
Days of Rage,”
was just a book to me that gathered dust
like all the profound and ridiculous titles
for an educated man of the 90’s to read,
and yet I found myself reading about…
“Allen, Ginsberg?”
“How absurd?”
As the train hustled down the railway
in its unevenly speeding loco-commotion
dropping tight suits rustled in frustration off
into ignorantly cold train passageways
delaying loving thoughts
and touches of the dears and darlings,
my mind breathed a sigh of relief…
“The day is finally over.”
Tired of the status of “intern”
Mind wandering into an empty place
where the mind just drifts
on time, places, and people,
But…”Allen Ginsberg.”
“Allen Ginsberg?”
“How absurd?”
Of what I remembered
the beat of Allen Ginsberg
appeared and could not be removed
until this piece was released
Allen Ginsberg in his time was a white Bohemian broom story
he told with his siren of beat jazz
Sweeping crisis into a pile
Howling from the apex
Erecting fists of concrete mental jungles
defined by the season to seduce the beat down
and yet…
when he came to my school
I didn’t even go to his lecture
“Allen Ginsberg who?”
That fool don’t even know my struggle
my grief…
While watching the TV lusting
for our women with everything but black guys,
as if we could never love them
As if brown on brown skin was not enough
I had term papers up to my ass
and a free ride was for the imagination of majority thinking
about minority
“Cause I worked hard for mine.”
All the same time, trying to live out the reason for a rhyme
and the question of the day that persuaded me to think
the way I think
was pronounced like this…
“Let me as’k you this,
Let me as’k you this…
Can you whip, my ass?”
Had to become a task master
cause ain’t no sunshine where I’m from
because we just dealt with things
I, a black Hip-Hop beat tape
“Needing to kick something,
that means something…”
a spoken word verse about freedom
cursed to constantly consent to having to explain myself…
to explain myself, to explain myself
stitched into the invisible
catching sail into the love of the light…
“And I know you will see the light…
Once you
Understand
What you
Mean to me
Dar-lin.”
I could not believe my mind lingered on him.
not that cadence of “cool, cool Allen Ginsberg cool.”
snapping crazy fingers…”I guess that’s poetry.”
It was on that beat movement,
on the craving for redemption of the time we were living in
and I guess that is what made me think of “Allen Ginsberg.”
His name was a zipped file that co-habitated with mine
on the same disk drive
“Karim-Is…” UNDERCONSTRUCTION
and as I exited the train at Penn Station
cause it was my time to leave
I could not believe that Allen Ginsberg was on this train ride
from Washington, DC to Baltimore
eating Oatmeal cookies
shedding crumbs on my leather exterior
trying to make eye contact
“I don’t go that way.”
or maybe there was a later lesson to be learned
Someday
One day maybe
when my life has come close to passing me by
I’ll return to the same spot on the train
where Allen Ginsberg hangs out
and I’ll linger for a while longer
to see what he was saying…
Icon: Revising In the Dark
Dedicated to Lucille Clifton
Midnight over me
Car lights in face
Yet you claim to not see me
Needing me for your money
And your Quota
Incenses surround my personal space
And nobody knows my
sadness.
Emergency!!!
Somebody call the cops on this crazy fool!
On this crazy fad
On this crazy color
Everybody trying to be like me
like black is a seasonal color
We are people
Not T-shirts
Icon stopped for no damn reason
But he must have done something
Deviant
Labeled deviant, at birth
Look at me
Really, look at me
Know me
Change…
Even Arthur Ashe was Black Listed
Bad Ass Black Male
Bad intention presumed.
See me as I am
Taken from my land
Taken from my momma’s
Blown away from knowing
Me.
Incense ease my pain
I see signs
Failure they say…
I see signs
Forget them who say I will fail
Icon…Yield black man
No right during school
This world with its color code
Too black…
Not black enough
Too much melanin
Downgrading me,
Yet you want to sell my shadow
Prices pasted on my forehead.
It’s hip to talk black
Walk black
Jive black, wear black
With a little white collar
White collars make us
Look successful
Is it the way we lean in our Lexus
that says, we doing okay?
When you think of me…
Think Ebony Golden Chocolate Almond-dipped,
beautiful
And that’s not like I had to write it down
to know it.
5///
The Beatnik
Dedicated to Penn Station, Baltimore
“The 60’s
Years of Hope
Days of Rage,”
was just a book to me that gathered dust
like all the profound and ridiculous titles
for an educated man of the 90’s to read,
and yet I found myself reading about…
“Allen, Ginsberg?”
“How absurd?”
As the train hustled down the railway
in its unevenly speeding loco-commotion
dropping tight suits rustled in frustration off
into ignorantly cold train passageways
delaying loving thoughts
and touches of the dears and darlings,
my mind breathed a sigh of relief…
“The day is finally over.”
Tired of the status of “intern”
Mind wandering into an empty place
where the mind just drifts
on time, places, and people,
But…”Allen Ginsberg.”
“Allen Ginsberg?”
“How absurd?”
Of what I remembered
the beat of Allen Ginsberg
appeared and could not be removed
until this piece was released
Allen Ginsberg in his time was a white Bohemian broom story
he told with his siren of beat jazz
Sweeping crisis into a pile
Howling from the apex
Erecting fists of concrete mental jungles
defined by the season to seduce the beat down
and yet…
when he came to my school
I didn’t even go to his lecture
“Allen Ginsberg who?”
That fool don’t even know my struggle
my grief…
While watching the TV lusting
for our women with everything but black guys,
as if we could never love them
As if brown on brown skin was not enough
I had term papers up to my ass
and a free ride was for the imagination of majority thinking
about minority
“Cause I worked hard for mine.”
All the same time, trying to live out the reason for a rhyme
and the question of the day that persuaded me to think
the way I think
was pronounced like this…
“Let me as’k you this,
Let me as’k you this…
Can you whip, my ass?”
Had to become a task master
cause ain’t no sunshine where I’m from
because we just dealt with things
I, a black Hip-Hop beat tape
“Needing to kick something,
that means something…”
a spoken word verse about freedom
cursed to constantly consent to having to explain myself…
to explain myself, to explain myself
stitched into the invisible
catching sail into the love of the light…
“And I know you will see the light…
Once you
Understand
What you
Mean to me
Dar-lin.”
I could not believe my mind lingered on him.
not that cadence of “cool, cool Allen Ginsberg cool.”
snapping crazy fingers…”I guess that’s poetry.”
It was on that beat movement,
on the craving for redemption of the time we were living in
and I guess that is what made me think of “Allen Ginsberg.”
His name was a zipped file that co-habitated with mine
on the same disk drive
“Karim-Is…” UNDERCONSTRUCTION
and as I exited the train at Penn Station
cause it was my time to leave
I could not believe that Allen Ginsberg was on this train ride
from Washington, DC to Baltimore
eating Oatmeal cookies
shedding crumbs on my leather exterior
trying to make eye contact
“I don’t go that way.”
or maybe there was a later lesson to be learned
Someday
One day maybe
when my life has come close to passing me by
I’ll return to the same spot on the train
where Allen Ginsberg hangs out
and I’ll linger for a while longer
to see what he was saying…
