How I Was Born a God
How I Was Born a God (Spoken Word Rendition)
/ If you take a brotha as smooth as Dwayne Wayne from A Different World but with GED drip /& he falls in love with a woman as graceful as how Jada Pinkett Smith was in Woo / & together in bed they made a sweet song that ended on the note of a loud boom / & were it not for the generations of love grown in my great grandmother’s house /& left to the army of roaches & chewed paneled walls where my uncle stashed crack /& his throw-away pistols / I would say I was conceived in a bando/ a product of some twisted entanglement but I wasn’t / & per my arrival one doctor said I did not cry until / he held me by my leg upside down like some animal about to be slaughtered / but when I did my infant lungs whined as angelic as Whitney Houston’s voice before and even after her demise / There are some things that cannot be born beloved/ & I am one of them /A baby born with the adult version of himself beat in his brain /Diagnosed with black and white for vision / Young & anointed with the meekness of Moses and Meek Mill wit da braids / Cloaked in the faithfulness of Abraham/ & by this I mean I’m beautifully broken / By this I mean / a lor soldier from the hood indoctrinated with what my era calls The Universe / & your granny might say is an On Time God / What an oxymoron / Shoutout to my guardian angels in this room / tagging a message on the wall / that says life is fragile like the red rose growing from a crack in the weary sidewalk / Shoutout to the demon right next to him / caressing my left ear with a lustful whisper / saying being born a wedlock is nothing more than an angel invading darkness / By four, I could read a vibe like I could my sight words / By six, I knew I hated white shoes & jewelry / At 10, I saw a boy my age sell my father dope / At 11, I watched my mother pray so hard she almost fainted / & this is why I’m a complicated man / Because Baldamore is a city that reminds you of the first pain you have ever felt inside of your body / A deep gash in the heart / A bullet wound to the ego / & yes I survived more trauma here than the light post at the end of your block you claim / & i claim this pain like I do my birthright / Weeping / riding through my city whichwhere politicians write off as apathetic tax breaks / & these are my confessions / ranging from surviving the Crack Era / to not being able to afford to move my mama out her home / nestled between two bandos / so for now it feels like a mansion / For now, being poor is a mission statement / A struggle to stride through poverty & pain that’s knee deep / I say I’m a poet / not because of the words I bend between each line / but because most of the men I’ve known have sold dope or died / & I’ve lived to write about it / That’s poetry / It’s no wonder they ask if I’m a king or a God / Prophecy and hieroglyphs injected in my veins / a chamber in my heart shattered and reshaped into something that doesn’t look the same as before / a million tiny shards / stabbing at/ & snatching the strength you use to pull yourself back together for you to prevail anyway/ I’m here to bet it all on me / To write a sonnet for everything I have yet to say about myself / The story begins & ends / but more importantly unfolds / not with me / but with this generation that has replaced sentimental language with emojis/ I’m here to show you the gold in boys who wear Gucci headbands like birthmarks / & God in girls who are slaves to self-image / Before you judge the youth / beloved, judge who you were before life placed you in a choke hold / The end////