HELP!!! We are facing a $27,000 shortfall from now until December. With money getting tight for so many people, the number of new BC Paid Subscribers and BC Contributors is way down. Please become a BC Paid Subscriber, or send what you can as a BC Contributor. Already a BC Paid Subscriber? Login to see if it's time to renew or if you can contribute a little extra Click Here! Thank you for helping to keep BlackCommentator online for you.

We are made eternal
Living like we’re ephemeral
Betwixt the inferno
A purgatory self-made
From non-decisions and non-choices
Blind to the normal-para
Deaf to the voices
Playing favorites by claiming none
Stuck in the middle
Pretending it’s a riddle
Don’t want to misspeak or offend
Kowtowing a means to an end
Trying to be a diplomat
We’ve yet to see a real democrat

We shop online in our spare time
To fill the emptiness
We don’t want to feel
Scratched-down price tags
China-made poly-rags
Adherence to the clearance
Liquidation – one time only
Got us feeling lonely
We find comrades in gear, toys, and booty-call girls and boys

Not a husband or wife
Matrimonial rates abysmally low
Can’t keep blaming it on the downlow
We lack the life cred to be the ancestors of our antecedents
A pathology of deviance
Our love turned placating paramours
Playground pimps
And black leadership whores

Where are Kevin’s
or
Tavis’s
spouses?
Easily programmed louses following a hymnless choir
Stuck on sponsored forums and agendas
Mired in a desire for the fire
Can’t see the forest for the trees
When was the last time we knelt on our knees
To pray for our own redemption
And not a conniption of something
Relegated to the realm of this world?
Material matters whose life force splatters
Out with the trends of the next season?

I am trying to reason.

Hate and Shame killed my best friend
We high-five and good-time
With the beautician,
The minister of music,
And the neighborhood caterer
Encapsulating their existence as it fits our own comfort level
Can’t get level with the fact
Of being gay and black
Stuck on the low-down
But can’t embrace the down and out.

As Donnie sang, “Welcome to the Colored Section …”

Imusil and Tetrasil
Would have cured his body
But not his heart …
Meanwhile …
Your indoctrinated mind
Is calling me a conspiracy theorist

You are the one who must hear this.

The dollar is falling
Brothers obsessed with balling
Out on the court
Or out on the corner
Salivating over that rimmed-out Hummer
Destined to be the No. 1 stunner ...
No father in sight
Momma feelin’ good from a well-place spike

Strapped down to an electric chair with three strikes

Bling!

The winds are blowing
The spirits are moaning
A serene soliloquy of pity

The leaves are rustling
Polar caps evaporate
Kindred progenitors
Issue a Union of the State

The record we leave
Is in the air we breathe
What we do with
Each inhalation and exhalation
Should be the exaltation
Of an aim greater
Than the good that made us.

BC Columnist K. Danielle Edwards is a full-time communications professional, is a Nashville-based writer and poet. She is the author of Stacey Jones: Memoirs of Girl & Woman, Body & Spirit, Life & Death (2005) and is the founder and creative director of The Pen: An Exercise in the Cathartic Potential of the Creative Act, a nonprofit creative writing project designed for incarcerated and disadvantaged populations. Click here to contact Ms. Edwards.