6 minutes

I attended a workshop today called Workshop Facilitation 101: a workshop about conducting effective workshops. The facilitator conducted a spoken word workshop within this workshop to exemplify how to conduct workshops and asked us to write a spoken word piece in 6 minutes as one of the activities. This is what I came up with...

The earth has been split before
Shaken into awareness
given new life
taught to see through new eyes
This earth you call your mother
but treat as your child
now she crys
shaking, quivering
and you feel it as if she resides inside you
I feel it like she clings to my womb,
kicking for new life
And I know I must, we must, perpare ourselves
for her rebirth
in the aftermath of yesterday,
Our world painted blood-red from the moment,
the colour of history,
the colour of injustice,
the colour of tears,
I haven't been in labour like this before
but for you I will,
even though I know your will is to bury me one day
you have carried me for too many (of those days)
to turn away now
So the next time you decide to split I won't
because the earth has been split before
and I am shaking into awareness.


Re: Japan 03/11/2011

The Death of Apathy

We speak of revolution
Of resistance to the persistence of illusions
The removal of the conscience from contemplation
As the mind is incubated in delusions
We speak of revolution s that we fail to start with ourselves.
Cannot delve into righteous internal protests
Yet want to profess our commitment
To power to the people and progress
We know less than we think and think less than we know when...
We speak of revolution

Met with indifference when asked critical questions
Treating tragedy like a trend as we trend-set
With only the widely televised capturing our attention
The devastation is in rotation on your local station
Watched like spectacles for our entertainment
And never did we entertain the chain of events
That led to the debasement of entire nations,
Ethnically cleansed and faceless, so we can’t face this negligence
realities concealed by officials and presidents
When we speak of revolution do we see the relevance?

Do we see the precedence we’ve set?
spiritually in debt when blood is shed and we can’t shed tears
So how much blood do you have?
Nations have searched for it to quench their thirst
While hearts circulate its stories
But how much is stored and how much is pouring?
How much is shed internally without you knowing?
How much of it does take to be awake?
How much must drain for you to give back what they take?

Transfusion of the soul—is there enough in you to circulate
Through the networks that connect us?
I’m talking vessels of truth that flood veins just to reach hearts
And not in vain just to recharge
It’s abstract like just a brief part of the story
I'm talking days of glory we’ve forgotten
I'm talking million man marches and saying “never again” to picking cotton
Yes, I'm talking Malcolms and Martins
Ches and Rosa Parks and rays to outshine the darkness
Ways to implant light where the heart is
And wisdom where your thoughts live

So when we speak of revolution,
Let minds feel and hearts think
Converse in one another’s tongues so they may exist as one
Understand one another...
so they may brand one another as the freedom fighters of your body
With every cell of your composition in the army
Fighting for the return of your blood,
this flowing liquid that allows your heart to beat so it can love,
Allows your lungs to breath so you can speak truth
Yet we blood-let, ingest messages of self-indulgence,
Addictions to freeze you conscience, spiritually impoverished,
Selling our souls and their bodies for economic progress,
Neoliberal individualistic culture forgetting the collective problem,
And we would rather not think of the causes, with lives full of voids we avoid

And that’s why to speak of revolution Apathy must die,
Assassinated to avenge the injustice it breeds throughout its life
Apathy has built a life breathing death to the mind,
Arresting empathy where it finds so that in indifference we find satisfaction
Indifference is a war waged against your body to stop it from seeking action
Relaxing in its comatose state it lives for yesterday
because it can’t carry its weight as far as tomorrow
infatuated by the lies of its powerlessness
it lavishes in the cowardice bliss of ignorance
and we’re devouring this like its a privilege not to know
that our tax dollars fund treachery across the globe
that our weaknesses are profitable and keep corporate pockets full

Where are the people in this progress?
Living in dual times of up rise and conflict
Times to make like Tunisia and Egypt and revolt against politicians who should be convicts
Like neurons we live in a nervous system because nervous is the system to resistance...
But before we seek revolution we must destroy the inferiority complex of marginalized communities, of minds monopolized by insecurity
At the hands of the hegemony that’s educated us out of our identities

So take back your legacy!
Take back your freedom!
The revolution will be internalized so that when we speak of it, we believe it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Performed February 13th @ Showcase Your Roots

Malcolm X and The Black Panther Party

A powerful montage shown in my discourses of dissent course.

The Revolutionary Spirit

The revolutionary spirit is comprised of a selfless relentlessness to create positive change. Many of us never develop this. Where we lack is not in the rigor with which we chase this pursuit, but in our perception of the starting point of this journey. The problem is that we want revolutions we fail to start within ourselves. It's not a lack of wanting something enough, but of being and living what it is we want. When we want more than we are willing to work for, dreams become nothing but notions living vicariously in the mind.

I have learned through observation, experience, and conversation that many people want to contribute something positive to the world, many have a yearning for revolution; but many of those who have the capability never realize this potential. The reason for this outcome is one of the great obstacles of the human experience: "realism". We fear what is uncertain, those intangible and tangible things that live outside our proximity. Realism acts as a blanket of comfort convincing us only that which has already occured is possible, ultimately destroying the imagination.

When we lose our capacity to imagine, our lives become redundant as we are found lost in the imaginings of others, trying hard to convince ourselves that the dreams we've stolen have always belonged to us. We want so much to believe that our borrowed ideas are original beacuse without them we are left with a graveyard of dreams, unvisited. We assasinate our own dreams, our own selves, and bury the evidence by cloaking ourselves in the ambitions of others to create the illusion that we are living the lives we've imagine--that we are free.

Wiping our hands clean of our true selves, we walk through life deluded to believe that our choices are well-calculated and clever, that if we break this chain of conformity we will be unsuccessful. This message carries itself proudly in our institutions, media, and pop culture with a plot to infiltrate the mind and control the masses. This because, in the critical thinking of rebels to this status quo, those who dare to question, lives the audacity to ingite revolutions. Revolutions that threaten this culture of conformity.

What about those who have the courage to dissent? Does this courage alone dictate the revolutionary spirit? Courage is only part of the battle. Many toil over the fruition of their ideas, innovations intended to change the world, and through it all a revolutionary spirit may or may not exist within them. The absence of the spirit behind the act renders the act insincere, though it may produce positive effects. This occurs when altruistic acts are reduced to a therapeutic means of coping with one's life or filling a void. "Because it makes me feel good," has always struck me as a disconcerting and incomplete answer to the question of why activism is necessary. There is no urgency, no sincerity, or evidence of consciousness in a self-involved motive to do good for others. We have to do better than acting merely to buffer the guilt of not acting.

It is better to act for the sake of those in need of your actions, to help give a voice to the voiceless, liberation to the oppressed, and dignity to the denigrated. However, I believe the purest reason for activism is for the sake of God--to see the spiritual connection of each member of the human family through the singular source from which we all came into existence. Through this divine lineage of every human soul, we have not only a worldly but a spiritual duty to protect/perserve our brothers and sisters in humanity. This is the essence of activisim; an understanding and acceptance of this responsibility is the essence of the revolutionary spirit.

Tahrir square, Eygpt

Rememberance is at the core of the revolutionary spirit.

Essay series 1.0

Spiritual endurance.

Humanitarianism.

Philanthrophy.

Dissent.

Revolution.

Change.

What does it take to be better than who you were yesterday?

God Willing, I will write an essay series attempting to answer this question. Every other Friday starting next week, I will try to publish these essays on this blog to share them with you. The essays will be mostly (if not all) opinion-based so feel free to dissuss, ponder, and/or challenge the posts of this series.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks at temptests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown although its height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come;
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even till the end of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved
Then I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-William Shakespear

May we love with the audacity of a Shakespearian sonnet.

War of Words

The gravity of words wrapped in the brevity of time
weighs heavy on my heart in pursuit of my mind
As sentences pull me into their core
and break me down like I've broken them before
They deconstruct me to discover why I've constructed them
While I borrow their letters and put my trust in them
as we put our trust in God.

I am the general to their army, revolution to their cause
We charge against oppressors
To put them on blast we blast bombs of expression
Words as ammunition, I pull the trigger to my pen and--
Flood the battlefield with ink bullets
POETIC WARFARE

We told you that it's war here
because we will not be complacent to your occupation
We will not let you steal the hearts of nations,
erasing compassion to replace it with hatred
We will not be left waiting for your promised revelations that will never come
We stand firm when you tell us to run
with enough courage to throw stones down the barrels of your guns

My army and I are one
Essence intertwined, poetically inclined
designed to invade your mind with rhymes
and make you pay mind to your mind
fine tuning perception until you see signs in the signs

We break words to break nerves of those who try to break us
That's why I cook verses in my basement
Elements full of boiling statements
Waiting to be fed to hungry nations deprived of soul food
I put my creations into their palms so they can hold food
I write their stories of liberation with the same pen I use to liberate them

Words will be put in their appropriate cages--withing lines of pages
I put syllables behind bars, breaking grammatical norms
they are my prisioners of war
We manipulate existing structures that confine us, strive to define us
As we find us behind bars that align us
Unifying as freedom fighters

We live outside our cells breaking shackles of prisions
We are the listners, the observers, the voices
We are the senses making sentences out of senitments to erase the senselessness
We are the temperment that calmed your nerve when your temper went
Same ones that taught you struggle for your benefit

We are the knowledge that taught you corruption is the currency of most of the world's presidents
but knowledge comes with the responsibility of self betterment
To be better than the self that resisted resistance in the face of your spiritual-psychosocial-emotional afflictions
See these depictions are beyond diction
They are affirmations of our commitment to truth
Where troops fight superficality with substance,
opression with justice

Words are weapons of the struggle
They can self-destruct if you let them muffle
They can paralyze ambitions with the same pen that wrote them
if you don't provoke them into action
For what good is a lyrical bomb if you don't know how to blast it?
Revolutions are never passive.
We need to actively dissect the lessons of our introspections
and wage war on those that work against us

Tell them with conviction: "your word is out and you can't protect it
So ink will be shed on your deception
Our veins are full, we load our pens as we inject them,
and drain your MTV and CNN...the venom that we were drenched in,
You're greatest weapon, expression, is now in our possesion.
So where are your armaments? infecting our arteries or aimed back with no pardoning?

We will not apologize for reclaiming our freedom
We speak because our silences applaud your treason
We refuse to be reasons for the prepetuation of misinfomation
Reducation is the primary strategy in our mission
So we launch missles of wisdom
Hoping to find minds in search of provision
Minds in starvation from the famine of your control"

So this. is. war.
A war. of. words.
Because words have weight.
Their value is in their mass.
So don't purchase a heavy weapon if you lack the strength to grasp.