My father is named "Edgar Allen" after Poe.

I am named "Maya Ange'le" after Maya Angelou. 

My father understands that he should expect no grandchildren out of me, but if someday I get a cat or something, her name will be Nikki. 

Reblogged from Free Bird

I would be a very loyal customer...

Reblogged from Indie. Radiant. 

It would be amazing to stick with the same subject over a period of time and go through increasingly higher prices to see how the idea can develop. But it would also be fascinating to pick a different subject every day for the same price. I'm not a coffee drinker, but if I were and passed this guy everyday, I would totally fork over that $3 for coffee for a poem instead. Poems are forever.

This made me cry

Since Zimmerman's arrest 7 weeks after Martin's death, we are finally on the road to something we've come to call "justice". But that word seems so thoroughly inadequate. A world where things like this can happen and no one cares for so long and mothers have to feel this way about their sons and five year old boys ask heartbreaking questions should never be called "just". Where is the justice in these kinds of fears?

On Nicki Minaj.

I listened to/saw the video for the first half-ish of Nicki Minaj's "Stupid Hoe" last night. I say the first half because I actually couldn't bring myself to sit through the entire thing. It was like torture; I love myself too much to subject myself to such foolishness. Some things can't be unseen/heard. 

It's like, okay, from an academic perspective, I would really like to like Nicki Minaj. Or at the very least, to be able to appreciate her and what she's trying to do. I want to embrace her like I embrace Rihanna, for owning her sexuality and putting herself out there with an agency not often afforded to women, and particularly not to women of color, even in 2012. I want to applaud her for being the only female member of Young Money, and on an even greater scale for like, reintroducing the female rapper, whom we haven't really seen since Eve and Lil' Kim disappeared a while back. I want to commend her for being unashamedly and unabashedly herself in the face of an entertainment system that tries its damndest to mass produce creativity.

I want to have all this respect and maybe even some love for Nicki Minaj. I really do. But I just...find it hard to. I have three songs by the Black Barbie in my music library, "Fly," "Your Love," and "Super Bass". She is featured in three other songs in my library: Gyptian's "Hold Yuh," Sean Kingston's "Letting Go," and Trey Songz's "Bottoms Up." I have few major issues with any of these songs, but they're but a fraction of Minaj's work overall.

It's like, okay, first off she just kind of freaks me out, with her ridiculously colored wigs/makeup and her incessant tics in her music videos. But, as my blog description proclaims, I believe in the power of making audiences uncomfortable to inspire change, so I'm not going to knock her for freaking me out. And as a full-figured woman, I definitely appreciate a nice rack, but...she's just got too much artificiality going on there for me. But that's just a personal preference and I'm not gonna come out and say I'm like, against cosmetic surgery entirely, because it really does change some people's lives for the better. I just kind of wish she embraced her natural body, but hey, this isn't enough to write her off entirely. 

It's songs like "A$$" and "Stupid Hoe" and "Did It On 'Em" that get me. It's not that "A$$" is "too sexual" or that any of these songs are "too aggressive" or "too aggressively _______," it's that they're just too damn vulgar for my tastes. (And the fact that "Stupid Hoe"'s entire chorus is "You're a stupid hoe, you're a, you're a stupid hoe" is just problematic on all sorts of levels.) It might not even matter what your message is if it's so buried in seemingly unnecessary vulgarity that people can't find it. I am dubious of the idea that intent matters more than consequence. 

And then, okay, can we talk about this Barbie thing? Sure, people should be allowed to create their own identities and embrace them and yada yada. That's all well and good and I generally support it, but can we take a moment to analyze the identity she's putting forward? She's the "Black Barbie." Pause. Barbies, by definition, aren't real. They're toys, children's playthings to be used in whatever way the play-er wants and then tossed into some dark box, only to see the light of day again when the play-er decides. They have no will, no volition. They make no choices. They are only used and thrown away, used and left to collect dust. I wasn't really upset if Barbie's head came off because I combed her hair too hard or if my teething little brother chewed on her feet, because Barbie was a thing. By aligning herself with that image, Nicki's objectifying herself, and I can't really see any reason why doing it to herself should be any better than a man (or a patriarchal society) doing it for her. And to add another level, Barbie dolls represent anatomical impossibilities and are one of the first ways in which society indoctrinates young girls with standards of beauty they'll never be able to meet, which it could be argued that Nicki is also playing into by modifying her body with implants. 

So many women have so much love for Nicki Minaj, but it's not really clear to me that she has love for us, or even for herself.

And rather than sharing any of Nicki's music here, because I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it on my page even in a critical sense, I'm going to share this poem by Jasmine Mans, whom Josh Bennet told me to check out way back when I met him at the Mellon Mays mixer in December:

It is not uncommon for Joshua Bennett to stop me in my tracks

or, the internet version of this, to make me click pause while I recollect myself, reassembling the looser pieces to incorporate the gem he just gave me that I never want to let go of. He often makes me feel like I'm breathing from my diaphragm like my middle school choir teacher used to make us practice laying on the floor with our textbooks on our tummies, but that fullness in my midsection isn't air, but soul. He overwhelms me in a delicious kind of way. There are parties going on tonight, but I am laying in my bed being simultaneously soothed and stimulated by Joshua Bennett and wanting to give myself permanently to someone who has that kind of relationship with words. It's just these recently redecorated walls and me in here, but I'm still clapping, clutching the skin in the hollow of my neck when he says something particularly noteworthy, and occasionally letting out one of those involuntary "Mmmm"s like imaginary dude just got an especially good stroke in.

This video got two pauses and inspired me to write this post. Watch it. (And see if you can guess where I had to stop to recollect.) 

Also, I have realized that he may be subconsciously behind my fascination with Black hipsters. And I have no problem with that. 

Firsts

You were my first gentleman

The first to sweep me off my feet

You were the first man to ask me on a legitimate date

or want to meet each other’s families

You were the first man I could imagine bringing home

for Thanksgiving Dinner, or going away with

You were the first time I didn’t feel embarrassed

No, I was entirely comfortable in my own skin

with your teasing sensitivity all over my own skin

You were the first man I wanted to lay myself bare for,

though I could only manage that in the most obvious of ways.

You were the first man I welcomed wholly into my space,

the first man I wanted to clear out a drawer for.

You were the first man to make me feel treasured.

You made me believe in love after I’d long-forgotten how.  

I was the first woman to try to share her life with you,

the first to always want you around.

I was the first woman you thought you could make happy.

Rife with raw emotion, I was the first woman

to make your life complicated.

I was the first woman you treated like a Queen.

I was the first to show you there difference between

love as something you do and love as something you’re in,

for you could only manage the former (and do it spectacularly).

I may have been the first woman to stress you out

or to make you ask yourself really difficult questions.

I was the first woman you shared a bed with, and in that

I hope I’m not the first woman you compromised yourself for.

We were each other’s first serious relationship,

and firsts are a series of trial and error.

We wondered more about what the other person wanted

or expected than we paid attention to ourselves.

We killed a hundred conversations with kisses.

We said things we weren’t ready for.

We are each teacher and student, villain and victim,

the player and the played. Somewhere between

lust and love, we were each other’s first adventure.

Despite inexperience, we treated each other well

We gave to each other as well as we could.

Now it’s time to give back to ourselves.  

Intimacy

I was young and naive once. Don’t laugh too hard,

we all were. And when I was, I equated intimacy with, well, sex.

Or the clandestine touching and kissing that may or may not

have been leading up to it. The rushed whispering of “Can I”s

and “Let me”s. The relinquishing of clothing.

The offering of oneself piece by piece. 
 

You have taught me that intimacy does not come in pieces.

That it is neither the desire for or the act of nudity, not its touch or taste.

It does not, in fact, even necessitate these things.

It is, perhaps, the feeling of nakedness, of wanting shamelessly

to lay myself bare before you. It is wanting to shout the boldest of “Let me”s,

“Let me give you all of me.” 
 

It is seeing that gift appreciated fully. It is learning the true meaning of the word

acceptance. It can play, like tickle wars in between bouts of kissing,

but that play has purpose--intoxicating, stimulating, your smile is the highest high

It is your tongue in the gap between my two front teeth, your words saying you

love even this hidden part of me. It is not caring whether I’ve shaved.

It is bed head and morning breath after the best sleep I’ve ever had every night with you.

It is wanting to spend every night with you. It is embarrassing stories from

elementary school and the tenderest of teasings. It is both talking freely and

having comfortably quiet time. It is knowing the weight of your head in my lap.

It is honesty. It is never needing to put on a brave face.

It is pure unadulterated fascination at the wonder that is you.

It is “I need us” over “I need you”. It is “Share my life.”
   

I used to believe that love was an impossible dream.

I once thought happiness was an emotion rather than a state of being.

I didn’t know growth could stem from joy.

I was blind to the difference between frenzy and fervor.  

In the past, I mistook physicality for intimacy.

Thanks, Giving

I always chuckle to myself when folks call this Turkey Day

I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve always been a ham kind of girl.

I always wonder when folks call this Thanksgiving Day

who exactly I’m supposed to be thankful towards

For Jesus is someone else’s Lord and Savior, and I don’t

praise Allah either. My thanks are jokes to Life’s daily

demigods and I’d like something a bit more substantive

than thanking my lucky stars. The Universe just sounds like a

cop-out for people who don’t like the sound of God.

So who am I thanking?

My mother, for bringing me into this world and damn near

breaking her back every day to give me every inch of life she can spare?

The ex-stepfather I abhor, because if he hadn’t walked into my mom’s life

mine would have been displaced, my friends and family misplaced, a family

of two and two alone gone back to Georgia, my mom’s first home?

Georgia, where my family has lived since before we had a choice.

Should I thank my too-many-greats-to-count grandmother for surviving the passage

in the dank disease-infested bottom of that ship?  Or my grandfather

of the same generation for liking what he saw up on the auction block

enough to sneak away from his wife in the middle of the night  and

sell his daughter away when she was born with blonde hair and blue eyes?

Blonde hair and blue eyes, like some of my closest friends,

so should I thank the late Dr. King for taking the glory from everyone who’d

dreamt before him?  Chris Hall, my high school’s English Department Supervisor

for making me realize the dreams I’d dreamt weren’t lofty enough, that I was calling

a sledding hill a mountain when I had the tools to tackle Everest? Chris Burch,

my first sweetheart, for teaching me that sometimes it’s better when dreams don’t come true?

The admissions committee member that tossed me into the right pile, for reminding me that

sometimes, they do? Nene, for seeing what I was repressing and getting me involved?

India.Arie for reminding me to Slow Down and appreciate the Little Things, like

whoever instituted a monthly Soul Food Night at the Princeton Quadrangle Club?

Under chaos theory, tabula rasa, and the idea of alternate realities, should I thank everyone

 with whom I have ever crossed paths, for without them I might not be me? All six billion, eight-

hundred-eighty-four-million, thirty-seven thousand, eight-hundred-forty-six people on the planet,

because the world might somehow be different without one of them? Should I just thank myself,

or include things I simultaneously love and hate, like society and affirmative action, like my father? 

The power went out as we were warming the candied yams. I used my laptop as a flashlight during the

candles-and-matches-hunt, and as we joined hands to bless our candlelit Thanksgiving dinner, I realized

exactly how many people and things and bittersweet circumstances I have to be thankful for. They each

have their own masters, Gods, and engineers, and so today I will simply thank the ties that bind us all.

My Mother's Daughter

I already blogged about this, but after going to this fantastic spoken word event on Friday Night, I'm feeling poetic:

My Mother’s Daughter

On nearly every flat surface to be found

in the living room on the second part of the first level

of a cramped townhouse in a worsening neighborhood

somewhere between small town and suburban New Jersey,

there are photographs of my mother’s daughter.

As my mother likes to note when her gaze falls longingly

on one of these photographs, or the headshot on my ID,

her daughter has beautiful, long, straight hair that curves inward

ever-so-slightly towards the ends, resting peacefully on her collarbone.

Her daughter wears glasses every day, and isn’t ever wearing makeup.

My mother looks at me, then her eyes dart to one of these photographs,

as if the frozen moment might come back to life and reassure her,

or transform the woman standing before her. There’s my daughter, she says

wistfully, as she smiles, practically begging the question: Who, then, am I?

A project she started gone horribly wrong? The little girl who had the nerve—

the absolute gall—to grow up with a mind of her own, a mind encased

by a hard head surrounded by black skin, a black face she has grown to love and embrace,

a face framed by a decidedly untamed collection of the coarsest variety of Shirley Temple curls:

they draw attention, seemingly warrant a ceaseless stream of comments and questions,

as if the choice to let my hair spiral into its natural thousands of revolutions

sends me spiraling into this unwanted label: revolutionary. As if just

letting my hair grow out of my head like anyone else is now somehow revolutionary,

funky, cool and new. As if my mane is a statement, not just a ’do.  Though Akon and

India were a mismatched pair, part of me wants to scream I AM NOT MY HAIR,

but most of me recognizes that, somehow, that’s not exactly true.

If the decision to rock the kinky curls and show my eyes to the rest of the world,

to be natural in one respect, and highlighted and emphasized in another,

is, in her mind or anyone else’s, all that separates the woman writing these words

from the girl in all the frames, then I have to say I am my hair. And my contact lenses.

And my smoky green eye shadow and stone-and-seashell jewelry. As if.

As if, like my mother hopes, this is just some phase I’m going through.

As if it isn’t what I never realized I’d been waiting years to do.

As if I were born to bear the yanks and tugs, burns and burning, to be beautiful.

As if Beauty is the skinny, fair, straight-haired girl who tames the Beast, and nothing more.

As if I should be so easily definable, classifiable, able to be labeled and thrown into a box.

Dear Mother, and Spectators: I have three different shades of powder. I switch with the seasons.

My bra size seems to finally have settled on somewhere between a 38- and a 40 D. You passed on

your big booty, but not the rhythm to make it clap. I stopped hiding behind my frames and my bangs;

now I ask the world to open its eyes and see me. I am exactly who Nature and our salt-and-pepper

shaken family tree intended me to be, and above all else, I, not her, am your daughter.

My New Motto in Life

What exactly my dear are you clinging to

Some propaganda stating you've gone as far as you're going to?

That your skies are finite and limited

That your growth is an impossible dream

That your future is inhibited

Aw please, they been shoveling them lies since the '50s

Can't nobody decide what your life can move through

This is your time and your challenge--what is it that you want to do?

Sit and be still and not shine the way your light was meant to?

Oh, I pray that ain't true, I pray that ain't true

Aw please, don't fall into the abyss because something negative once ruled you

Please understand I'm from where you are and I've got to fight my demons too

Please don't give up because somebody broke your heart and some things fell through

This is life. You owe it. Life does NOT owe you, okay?

An obstacle is something that impedes or blocks one's way

You can climb over, you can dig under, you can chip through it, you can go around it, you can move it, you can ignore it, but you can DO it

YOU      CAN        DO          IT

-Jill Scott, as seen in this song by Kem:

I had a geode once...

^Sort of like this.

The person I was with told me not to buy it. His argument was something to the effect of there would probably be better things I could spend my money on. My counterargument was that I'd always wanted one.

...Damn it's crazy how hindsight is such a BITCH. Those three sentences really sum up his and my entire relationship...and happened within a matter of hours before the relationship ended.

I don't know exactly what happened to that geode. I may have gotten rid of/hid it somewhere in  one of the bouts of depression and anger I wrestled with for months after this all went down. Which really SUCKS, because despite all the metaphorical deeper-meaning-ness of that statement, I really have always wanted a geode.

I bring this up now because my residential college is sponsoring a trip to the Dodge Poetry Festival. 

I'm sure most of you don't automatically see the connection here. The Dodge Poetry Festival is where I bought the geode. It's where I almost had my first kiss. It's the first place I ever publicly belonged to someone else since the days when my father wanted to put me on a leash (don't even get me started...). It is without a doubt one of the most naturally beautiful places I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. 

It's also the place where my heart was broken [hopefully] harder than it will ever be broken again. It's the place where I realized that having a past doesn't necessitate a future, and that even someone I have trusted for as long as I can remember may not necessarily deserve said trust. 

It's a place I want to go back to and also a place I fear ever returning to.

The trip is free.

I should go. I know I should. I'm just going to need some time to turn that should into a will.

I mean, can returning really be that hard? Can it be as hard as turning him down when he came slinking back into my life freshman year was? Will I see the haystack we rolled in, the tree I climbed, the bench we sat on, and feel the urge to contact him? Will I kick myself for still having his number? 

Or will I just go and have a good time at a festival I love? Can life be that easy, just this once?

Bonus points if you get the literary reference.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...

Fact: I love Robert Frost. But that's not what this is about.

I have this friend, a very close friend, in fact, who loves to ask really deep and somewhat philosophical questions out of nowhere, and expects an instant answer. I usually just give her one of two looks: o.0 (read: wtf are you talking about?!) or -__- (read: ...really?) when she does this, and wanted to do the same this last time, but I actually had an instant answer to the question. It came to my head before I could register either of the two looks, and then I couldn't deny it. 

The question? Something along the lines of "Who do you want to see but don't really want to see at the same time?" 

...You probably know where this is going.

Well, I saw him today. It...wasn't a total awkward-fest, but it wasn't totally non-awkward either. It's like...just when I'd totally and completely gotten over what it feels like when he has me in his arms, you know? I had to invite him to dinner, because in the situation, it would have been rude not to, but part of me was slightly relieved when he said he already had plans...I'm not ready to start making a fool of myself again. 

It's time to make a decision about this once and for all. (Can I even do that without talking to him about it? Is that fair to all the involved parties?) I have a date on Friday with someone else! If he asks me about Friday, will I tell him that? Will I sugar-coat by just saying I'm headed up to Rutgers? I don't know if/how he'd be affected by either answer. Just because I'm going on a date (okay just because I'm going on my first date ever) doesn't mean that the door we nudged open in May is closed on my end. I just...dammit, after all this time, I still don't know if it's open on his.

TURN OFF, BRAIN. STOP READING TOO MUCH INTO THINGS.


...do I ever want to have to wonder what might have been? Does he?

Random train of thoughts!

Follow me, this one is fun.

So my music player is on shuffle, and "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton just came on. (Don't judge me, 90s music is awesome.) So I was contemplating the line from the chorus, If I could fall into the sky, do you think time would pass us by? 

Falling into the sky was the part that was interesting to me for a moment.

It made me think of Falling Up, the book of poems by Shel Silverstein, whose books were among my favorites during childhood. (The Missing Piece is still a pretty accurate description of my life as a whole.) 

Thinking about Shel Silverstein made me remember this awesome thing that happened to me when I was visiting my dad in Florida last year. We were driving somewhere, probably just to Walmart or something, and I saw the best sign ever.

 

A Discourse on Discourse

The French draw a distinction
between parole, the faculty of language,
and langue, its conceptual existence.

English only pretends to.
We have separate words,
speech and language,
but lazily we lump them together,
call them synonyms. Interchangeable.

In France, Canada, Senegal, Haiti,
our concept of language
is unattainable.

Chomsky and all his friends agree,
inventing two languages,
I and E. You can only have I,
and many debates will heat up
over whether E even exists.

They cut out our tongues
and we lost our writing, too.
They have robbed you of your speech.

They have placed the toughest P.O.
on your parole. You can only have I,
and it is specific to you.
Your tone, your style, these too are gone
with the lost your most immediate capacity.

The French draw a distinction.
Analysts will call them more precise.
Perhaps they only know the value of a voice.

Come Hell or High Water

I wanted to write a poem about Haiti. I came up with one about Katrina. Regardless, I thought I'd share.

Come Hell or High Water

                                I.

She is a woman, tall and solidly built;

you have criticized her for not being dainty.

But none of that matters now because,

along with her mother’s swaying hips and

her father’s broad nose, she has inherited

her great-great-grandmother’s hands.

Hands that picked more cotton than many a man’s,

then graduated to nursing other women’s babes

for a dime she couldn’t even depend on.

These are this woman’s hands, on hiatus

from history, needing no training to pluck

half-drowned children from rising waters and

baked beans bobbing like buoys from Piggly-Wiggly aisles.

She’s a survivor, you’ll justify,

ignoring how your mother’s mother made her earn the name.

                                II.

She is a woman, single, holds down two jobs;

you have criticized her for not being in the home.

But none of that matters now because

her pots and pans are floating up the stairs.

No longer confined to the hearth,

she has risen above –

beside her, as she sits on the roof,

staring in disbelief at the deep that,

yesterday, was her neighborhood,

her youngest son shivers. She wraps him

in the only cloth in sight, that striped and spangled

banner she hanged proudly four years since.

As the news choppers pass loudly by, she hopes

you realize that saving his American (albeit black) body

is the only thing can save your white soul.

                                III.

She is a woman, barely. A girl of 9 years;

you have criticized her for being an animal.

But none of that matters now because,

despite all the decency her mother ever wished,

she has been leashed like the children in the malls.

Her orange jump rope winds around her delicate waist

reaching all the way to her mother’s strong wrist,

matched by the garden house binding baby brother

to Mama’s breast as through the water they wade.

She mourns the loss of her best babydoll,

hoping Evelyn can swim, like Mama is telling her to,

now that the water touches the beads on her braids. 

Stay close, Mama warns for the umpteenth time.

Over and over (you’ll refuse to believe her love is this fierce)

If the water wants you, it has to go through me.

                                IV.

She is a woman, almost. A grand stands between her and surgery;

you have criticized her courage to be herself.

But none of that matters now, because,

as she sifts through silt searching for salt-water-soaked

sunken treasures, of the personal sort, namely a photograph of

the father who disowned her and her most expensive pair of

Manolo Blahniks, she begins to remember the existence of

muscles she’d forgotten she had. Her Adam’s apple bobs

with exertion, sweat running from between her bought 38 Bs

 down to her carefully hidden penis, with its numbered days.

Her house is empty. Godless, she blames Mother Nature for having

giveth and taken away. Cursing the setback, Roberta remembers

what is was to be Robert. You will snort in disdain as,

armed with nothing but the halter top on her back,

she leaves for a house permanently halfway.