[This is sort of a follow-on to "Spittin Wisdom", and the pre-cursor to "The New Wisdom (Penny for your Thoughts, Fifth for your Penny)"]



I Crip walk and crow hop as my lips pop and fingers snap,
hips swaying to the beat
As men raise their hands and Slap! The other in a rhythmic trance.
And raise the other hand and Slap! on the face
Of a single mother, to put her back in “her place”
And women say it’s ok, it’s just because he loves her
The man says it’s ok, it’s because she doesn’t love him
But what they don’t understand
Is why the children
no longer love
…them…

Listen to my words, as they wind between the beats
Like belly dancers in Middle Eastern countries
Or children sold to win’ between the sheets
As my ear is attuned to listen to the sound
Of the funny cars, as they fly by
Like Negron stars, with their eyes to the sky
Who pass by those of my generation
Who seem frozen by the Gorgon stare endemic of the race
Stuck in the past.
As slaves are kept in place with the whips and the chains
Slaving to a government oligarchic, not “of the people”
“Blinging” with shiny metal on their mechanical “whips”
As they pay for the chains that are -still- used to define “us”
From which they hang the head of God who’s name they take in vain
As the previous generations hang their heads in shame
At the disrespect and disregard for authority, age, and tradition.
Deicidal children are deified by a society that will willfully immortalize
The horrors that men can do claiming a need to survive
or that “only God can judge me”
Brothers kill brothers for fear of showing vulnerability
Though their weakness is the fear to show anything but strength
Because true strength is found in facing your own weaknesses
Not giving in to, and using your fears
But we are as weak as our projected strength, and blinded by the irrational fear
Of being perceived as less than another
for a conspicuous lack of those physical things
Which “they” have taught us to use to define “us”
But, even were I arraigned, jewelry would not define “us”…
For the “funny cars” have flashing lights in blue and red
Cars: black-and-white. Free bracelets made of steel,
With a correlation for each wrist
As the “whip” flies faster with a flick of the wrist
And a flash of the lights, and sirens “make way”
But it is not just “their” fault, for as tribal chiefs
Sold the first slaves on the Ivory Coast
We allow ourselves to be “massa’ed” by the very beat that we used to define “us”
From back when “they” took all of that which defined “us”
And redefined “us”, that we may more easily conform
To the ideal slave that “they” would have made the “norm”
But now, we refuse to learn from our history, now made free to us
Though it is not all in history books, for true wisdom must be sought out
But we cannot learn from the past, when we are still stuck in it
And we cannot move forward into the future, until we reconcile with the past
…As the true slaves of days gone past, scream and roll over in their graves
For this is -not- what they fought, suffered, and died for
And we are merely living life for one day more
Crabs in a bucket: mass emancipation without proper planning
Was the confounding of our Tower of Babel,
For what do we have to fight, if we perceive the battle won?
And thus begins the true battle, for we wage war against ourselves
And those who would rest on the laurels that they did not earn
Demanding reparations for their father’s father’s lives…and their mother’s too
But it is the -curse- of the former generations that passes down to the present
Very rarely do the blessings inherit. Because blessings inherit the meek.
The meek do not inherit the blessings.
For, when the meek inherit the earth,
they still must clean up the mess that we have left behind
I’m not saying that it’s fair, I’m just saying that that’s Life

“Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it”
And if by “those” we mean “us”, then must not we define “us”?
For “know thyself” is but a basic axiom,
And, if the “beam” is in our eye, then why bother with the “moat” in the all-seeing “I”?
Or trying to put a Black face on currency?
Because, currently, we can barely handle The President that is carrying office
Or the responsibility of having one of “our” race in power…
So, it is essential to establish the paradigm of “us”
Before moving on to the more pressing problems that assail this generation, nation, and globe.

So tell me…how do we define “us”??