When did I become a black writer?
Was it at birth with deviant skin
Or when I found my voice -mirroring my sight.
My poetry somewhere between Heaney & Rage (Against the Machine).
I hear the black only adjectives again today,
but I’m already well too aware
Escape,
A dream I guess to be usual.
A tearing departure from the ties and debts
which all but depict the future
that’ll soon pass.
My dad said avoid being that guy
the old man in the corner of the club.
The guy nursing cherry wine or a more contemporary courvoisier and coke.
1Xtra keeps me musically on trend, though I question its taste more daily.
Future’s drawl’s too dank for my De La ears.
My playlist, it’s turned more club classic than new bangers.
Brandy, Jahiem and Tribe doing concerts to my demographic.
Didn’t they used be called SWV, Soul II Soul & Sade?
My classic playlist speckled with now cringey R&B…
… the odd Blink 182 I used to hide in my youth,
It’s overdue teenage angst now aloud.
It’s not contemporary
but it has the honest sound of a new old black man.
I wonder
do I see
more homeless,
more hopeless
and more clueless than ever before.
Or is this just the clarity
that adulthood offers?
Life’s fleeting dramas,
between the weekends first petite verre and it’s last exhausted exhale.
Perched upon each moment,
I lament the slow passing
of the day’s million stories, I sit
appreciating it’s finite beauty;
neglecting word, metaphor and so too their immortality.
I step across this morning’s Shirley playing field,
curving a festooned spider’s snare.
I sigh, treading through a snails bedroom.
But it’s 7:05 en route to being late to work;
A solo crow flows through, under a half cast sky,
the Eastern fog to the Western blue.
We were perched on the walls lip, down stream from the hipsters smoking working-class DIY cigarettes,
sipping prosecco.
The Regent’s Canal reflecting the last light of the day.
“This reminds me of the Congo, ” Wilfried starts.
“But I used to see dead bodies there”.
Not the unattainable picture of perfection
unavailable to those but printed in glossed fiction.
You’ve a face of diamonds and petals,
but a soul more disarming.
A bloomed rose of the ashen earth,
perfect in your humble honesty.
J.C. FitzDerick 