What Will You Hear?

Below is what I was going to read at the BUSSW commencement, until I decided I did not want to at all.

Was gonna read a poem with verses like the following:

Post-natal dove waking up to tend the garden,

Finds post-racial love-making done before it started.

Cause most fatal guns taking young to the departed,

Hear ghost aching lungs sing songs to heavy-hearted.

But I stopped.

I’m tired of the trying. I’m tired of the rhyming.

All of it’s been bothering me. That’s why these words are spoken, but this is not poetry. And I wonder, will you hear my spoken words if they are not poetry?

You think I'm inclined to speak in iambic time and tweak each phoneme into perfect rhyme to reach like low-beams to the dark inside and teach the phonies about shame and pride, like preach! But what if I'm not? What if I don't feel like it? What if I can't?

What if this is inarticulate, ineloquent, will it then be inadequate? What if metaphors fall flat, imagery fails to paint a pretty picture in your head? Is it then precisely as loud as…

What if the final sound to finish this line didn’t rhyme but instead…

I told you about suicide. Waking and wanting to die. About the love of another breathing out life. Breath into bodies as depression rides up the spine, like venom, and outside, swelling every vessel. How love squeezed and told the soul to breathe when venom struck it paralyzed.

Or what if instead I told you about homicide? Violence of a different kind. Shame taken so deep it looks like pride. Seizes the mind. Kill to belong. Deny life to be welcomed with the living.

What if suffering lives in a black body? What if suffering sticks a needle in the fold of an arm? What if law calls the suffering a crime? What if it puts metal in its grip - wrapped around its wrists. What if the pain is angry, mourning, ugly, broken – not that redemptive kind – not the clever kind, the handsome kind that gets co-opted by capitalism for an album or a book deal. Not the sweet kind that tricks you into receiving it so easily with grace.

I mean, thank God for Maya. Thank God for Audre. Thank God for Kendrick. For genius – for the philosopher poets who make violence an art form, so we can tolerate it long enough to be taught. But isn’t it kind of a shame they have to dress up pain all beautiful, just so we can stand to look at it? Isn’t it kind of a shame they have to work so hard to be heard?

The lengths one will go to be known. Just look around. How many permutations of suffering must one offer before finally offered a source of relief? It startles me. The adaptations we make out our violent and vital desperation to connect. To someone. To something. It’s so damn tragic. It’s so damn beautiful.

I urge you to hear the story if its artistry does not meet your standards. I urge you to receive the invitations in, no matter their design. What a privilege it is to be sent them, and what strength, wisdom, love to be celebrated when we accept.

So have you heard my spoken words? Or am I just up here talking to critics? Am I just up here talking to myself? Am I just up here talking to ghosts?