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my mother acts as if i hung the moon
but she can't help but criticize the way that it droops in the sky
she tells me i am just like her in looks
My relationship with my mother
Has been a series of trust falls
And she's never once caught me
.
But I keep leaning backwards
And hating myself
When I inevitably hit the ground
.
Thank you mom
For choosing my dad
For giving me life
For giving me perspective
For challenging me
For pushing me to want to do better than what I was seeing
For showing me the toxic traits I want to avoid
I'm a wicked person how others described me and my own parents.
I was born evil because I’m envious, selfish, and jealous.
I'm a wicked person how others described me and my own parents.
I was born evil because I’m envious, selfish, and jealous.
I still remember in vivid detail the first time my father made me bleed. It was a cold November evening and we had just finished dinner. I was all dressed up in my golden basketball jersey ready for a game.
For the first time I looked at her
And saw that she was her own.
Not just a mother but with
Pain and worries
Wearing her down.
We sat beside a hospital bed and
I'm good with children -- an axiom,
A loom that weaves tapestries of branching fates:
One depicts a teacher,
Another, a counselor,
A third, a nanny,
And all, a Mother.
Years of lost time
Quietly echo
Sentiments of regret,
Remorse,
And a vague sort-of hatred.
I wanted to tell you,
this life
it’s jovial, isn’t it ?
sprouted with his anger, his disbelief, his lack of acceptance
but her
The spider had crawled in from the depths of the unknown
The girl, seeing the creepy crawler, screamed to her bones
Oh, wait a minute! Amongst the shadows in the dark
Lies a man as strong as a shark
Your rationality is one of the things I admire the most about you
From your reaction to Brother when he crashed your car
You said I can go the distance, but then I think to myself, can I even make it past this barrier that stands sturdy before me. The one that blocks me off from society. What you don't see is your inability to crack open my minds door.
The day you entered my life
I know we won’t have any strife
Our family: Dad, child, wife
But that is just a big fyffe
A lie just to give you hope
Daddy don’t need to elope
Let me be honest, I can’t really express it, and I don’t know how I should break it down
*Sigh*
But ‘cause of you and the things you did, I’m happy you’re not around
Away from you.
Away from pain.
Away from judgement.
What’s to gain?
Everytime you said the note was flat.
If only you were here,
You would have been able to kiss me goodbye
Wish me luck and try your best not to cry
As I drove off to learn and live alone
Instead, I had to tell your tombstone
If only you were here,
I kept saying
What am I going to do
Left incapacitated I began to live
Interpreting the world
Found focus and motivation
To keep going
She’s looking at him and he’s looking at her
And neither of them will speak to each other
Over dinner there is only silence and the
Quiet clinking of glasses and mushy chewing
How are you doing? Are you sleeping well? Did you eat well? Do you
have enough clothes? Do you have enough to spend? Do you need anything?
How did she get him?
How did her get her?
Why do we have to be related
Live under what they call a roof
Dear Child,
I want you to come into the world
And I don’t mind if you cry
For it means that you can breathe
It means you won’t die
I will hug you to slumber
One in three adolescents are victims of cyber bullying. Now I don’t mean to belittle, but i’ve never understand cyber bullying because your eyes are your choice and you can turn away.
“Don’t push me to make decisions that I may regret later.” I heard you say this while on the phone with your sisters right before your dad died. I laughed. I fucking laughed out loud. Now what do you think that says about you?
Liz
It’s in the morning that I think of you
I can’t seem shake the feeling in my chest
Though I thought I was breaking through
The description of the To Be Heard Scholarship Slam asked the question of who I want my poetry to reach. The answer is simple, my daughter.
Remember when how you stood in front of the class
Lectured endlessly on the psychology of the mind
Compressed pain into tiny, sterile words
Depression and self-harm and anorexia,
Epigraph: Parents are in fact teachers, and though we feel that we can tell them anything, sometimes it is to them who we can't say our "sh*t." So, this is something I would like to tell one of my teachers, my father.
Children that are formed
In the mind
Before the body
Are always the least happy
They have to live up
I see a light.
A bright light.
But im not dying.
Or am i?
With all that i think and all that i do.
Did it ever mean anything to me?
Or even you?
No.
It couldnt have.
It shouldnt.
Just when I feel that our relationship has prevailed
You pull away and remind me why we've never been strong
Not even enough to withstand the falls
And never to rise
You rekindle the fire that burns my heart
You've hurt me so much.
But seeing you like this hurts.
After all,
you are my mother.
It’s hard seeing you scared of yourself.
It’s hard seeing you have bad dreams.
She walks into the picture
Obsidian skin brushing my eyelashes
And she sits.
Marble eyes rolling back into her head
And she falls into the pit of Death himself.
Death crunches at her dissolving bones
The most cowardly crime one can commit is leaving.
I remain fixed in this trance that one day, maybe one day, you'll come back for me.
Days fade on, years go by...
Slow in reality, quickly in reflection.
My Black is Beautiful, My Black is free
Thanks to all of the Blacks that came before me
Three years old no father killed by the life he lived
Please little black girl don’t cry
I reached but he wasn't there
“Life sucks. Then you die.”
Said a father to his son
The father was bored at the son’s baseball game
The father never came to another one
Only one vacation to the shore
I want a Son
I want to witness my baby boy’s birth.
I want to show him his promise, his worth.
When I grow up I will raise a beautiful baby girl
her smile will be so big that people will say she looks like her father
because her lips are just as cracked
