I am a dead man walking 

A mute man talking 

A blind man watching our brothers die 

And I’ve built our coffins much too often, 

It gets so dark when our mothers cry 

I know more than I want to, but not nearly enough. I thought I was writing for the love, but it just turns to be lust

And my trust in us was gullibility. 

The reality is just that I’m not who I was nor who I will be, but sometimes I feel me visiting and I fill me with the lush scent of soul. The flavor of feeling the rush of color I think the pleasure will kill me. The pressure squeezes and spills me to the language of the unseen, the unthought, and the undreamed. 

And my heart begins to pump that thick/rich/fluid of verse searching for a simple word or phrase to fill the phase between the wet nurse and the black hears. 

And I know sometimes my words lack worth, lack girth, lack the distance to travel from heaven to earth or from wind to brain or from soul to flesh. I hold my breath in the hollow hop that my hopes ain’t hollow. 

It’s just a message in a bottle or a genie in a bottle or a wino and his bottle or a baby and the bottle. 

The symphony of me is stuck in staccato like a broken/break beat/breaking the vinyl into bits of blackness spinning in circles. 

Come down select a last night the D.J. took my life, but left the speakers empty and the speakers speechless and the dancers still dancing or not. 

They don’t see our music as musing, merely amusing amusement. How could they know, in basement booths we’ve balanced the nexus between the soul and the flesh and the science and intellect. We rock genius like a necklace we drop jewels in gutters. 

But they fooled our mothers into thinking that they could raise sons in the darkness of night, but isn’t the night always dark before the sun is raised? And when the sun is raised, doesn’t it make the block hot and the eye squint and the breath sweat and the tree grow and the children play. The raised sun makes the pavement see the wavy apparitions the mirage of the future. 

But I know I am a dead man walking 

A mute man talking

A blind man watching our brothers die 

And I’ve built our coffins much too often, 

It gets so dark when our mothers cry, 

I wish I could sing for justice but I know no such song. 

by Amir Sulaman