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.
When did Fetty Wap
replace stevie Wonder,
with an infinitly more sight
but a sliver of insight.
Unsolicited
really that’s the only type of honesty there is.
A compliment bubbling through the lips of admiration.
un-tinged by the cynicism of self benefit.
Do I say thanks enough?
To those who do what I’ve come to expect.
To those who meet my assumptions, and fulfill my needs.
I wave a soon forgotten thanks
to those paused at the zebra crossing
allowing me to just catch the tram I would have just been late for.
My friends and family, bastions of support and love,
I see you,
even if my words do not reach your ears.
Perhaps I do not give enough meaningful thanks,
as I applaud my own hard work’s achievements.
But I’d be floored without your outstretched arms, your words
repairing my ego raising a coy smile.
Perhaps I shy away,
to give thanks is to admit a weakness, a vulnerability
healed by another’s words and actions,
a naked appreciation masked in a mini shame.
And so I’d like to thank you Ashley,
for all you’ve done
doing nothing special at all.
We’re the Tagine
ignored on the island
of a White Company decked kitchen.
Bought intending on extracting its exotic essence,
left out as decoration,
to exude vibrant metropolitan inclusion.
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.
This is real Street Art.
Passing snap-backed supra-beings say gawking at the Cass-Art aerosol cans
spraying a haute-couture satire of our post-modern globe.
You see this Street Art represents something;
the impotent critique
of artists whose Guardian reading parent’s
lamented Maggie’s closure of the mines north of London,
while saving for their loved one’s housing deposit.
This Art covers the vandalism of before.
Those graffiti cans smeared the marks of a pre-developed community.
What message did that graffiti have?
Nothing legible to those subscribed to The Guardian nor Mail.
Nothing at all, save
the names of the former youth of the estate,
it now priced to evacuate its dutiful placeholders,
so that those formerly lamenting the closure of Maggie’s mines, now
have a place for their children to pursue their adult childhood fantasies.
J.C. FitzDerick 