Posts tagged spoken word.

Janani B. performs “Anorexia” at the Spoken Word Collective spring show!

“Poetic Stickup: Put the Financial Aid in the Bag” by Carvens Lissant

Episode 7 - The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl 

this episode actually killed me y’all

‘Public Education’ written and performed by the DreamYard Preparatory High School SLAM Team. Spring 2011.

Staceyann Chin’s Poem About Equality & Our March

10 Things I want to say to a Black Woman by Joshua Bennett

mysterious-iniquity:

1. I wish I could put your voice in a jar. Wait for those lonely winter nights when I forget what God sounds like run to the nearest maximum security prison and open it.
Watch the notes bounce off the walls like ricochet bullets etching keyholes into the sternums of every brother in the room, skeletons opening rose blossom beautiful to remind you that the way to a black mans’ heart is not through his stomach, it is through the heaven in your hello; the echo of unborn galaxies that pounces forth through you vocal chords, and melts ice grills into oceans, baptizing our lips, until harsh words fade from our memories and we forget why we stopped calling you divine in the first place.

2. When I was born, my mother’s smile was so bright it knocked the air form my lungs and i haven’t been able to breath right since. Its something about the way light dances off of your teeth. The way the moon gets jealous when you mock her crescent figure with the shape of your mouth, queen. You make the sky insecure. self conscious at being forced to stare at your face every morning, and realize that the blues of her skin was painted by that symphony doing cartwheels on your tongue.

3. Who else can make kings out of bastards? Turn a foulest Christmas into a floor full of gifts in a kitchen, that’s smells like the lord is coming tomorrow and we must eat well tonight.
  Iused to think my sister was a blacksmith the way she bred fire and metal and made kitchen miracles at 14, making enough food to feed a little boy who didn’t have the words to say how much she meant to him back then, or enough back bone to say so the day he turned 20.


4. Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful i have ever known. the color of ink on a page, the earth we walk on, and the cross of my Saviour.

5. I’ve seen you crucified too. spread out on billboards to be spiritually impaled by millions of men with eyes like nails. Who made martyrs of your daughters. So I’m sorry for the music videos, for Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl, and the young man on the cornerthis morning.  Who made you want to shed your flesh, become invisible. Never doubt, they only insult us because… men are confused. we’re trained to destroy or conquer everything we see from birth.

6. If I ever see Don Imus in public I’ll punch him in the face. One time, for every member of the Rutgers and Tennessee women’s basketball teams. Then I’ll show him a picture of Felicia Rashad, Assata Shakur, Eartha Kitt, my mother, my grandmother, my 7 year old niece whose got eyes like fire bombs, and then dare him to tell me that Black women are only beautiful in one shade of skin.

7. You are like a sunrise in a nation at war. You remind people that there is always something worth waking up to.

8. When we are married I will cook. Do the dishes, and whatever else it will take to let you know that traditional gender roles have no place in the home we build. So my last name is an option. Babysitting the kids a treat we split equally and our bed will be an ancient temple, where I construct altars of wax on the small of your back and we make love likethe sky is falling. Moving, to the rhythm of bed springs and Bel Biv Devoe and angels, applauding in unison saying this is the way it was meant to be.

9. My daughter, my daughter will know her fathers’ face from the day she is born and I can only pray that this superman complex lasts long enough, for me to deflect the pain this world will aim at her from the moment she’s old enough to realize that the color brown is still not considered human most places. My daughter will have a smile like a wheelchair, so even when I am at my worst, when the krypton’s putrid planet threatens to render me grounded, the light dancing off of her teeth, will transfer the shards of my broken body into heart-shaped blackbirds, taking flight on wind that reminds me of my saviour’s hands, of my daughters’ smile, of my mothers’ laugh when I was in her womb.

10. Never stop pushing, this world needs you now more than ever.

realvermin:

they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.

I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”

“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”

“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”

…what’s genocide?

they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them

…what’s genocide?

Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him

…what’s genocide?

Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade

…what’s genocide?

she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal

…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Luz, this…
this right here…

is genocide.”

- Carlos Andrés Gómez

Nico Cary - I Want to Be a Revolutionary [iLL-Literacy]