Within the sound

Can you hear me?
Can you hear me beside slain thoughts that re-incarnated to become visions hidden in rhythm?
Can you hear me?
Within sounds resembling sweat and strife, sounds bottled in glass house emotions stoned by saprophytic systems.
I am within the sound of Ella, heartfelt, the embodiment of the sound of blue like musical skies.
I am within the sound of Lady day, the mourns of strange fruits covered in the struggles of Harriett Tubman & the dreams of Douglass.
I am in the tune of wading in waters spiritual, swinging low like grass cutters in the valley, the conviction in the sound of Moses as he broke his peoples chains, the sound of parting waters to craft freedoms road; The unheard sounds of tears, the praise in prayer and the celebration in a smile.
Can you hear me?
Or should i be the sound that punches through your ears making your soul break dance within your flesh, dance like David did without your body moving an inch. Should i remind you who i am lest you remember who i am not?
I have been called many names, some true while others mock me, claiming i no longer inspire to make song or poem, that my sound no longer tattoos dreams and is only heard in screams or raging streams.
I wonder if you can hear me. For just as i heard them all, i too, hear you.
I still hear the joy and pain alike, the sound of birth and death. I hear hearts and translate what they feel but they praise my translation & forget the translator.
To those that know me,
I am the sound of love. I am the sound of hope. I am the sound of freedom.
I am deliverance. I am the sound of peace and the symphony of grace.
Hear me now & feel what you once thought escaped you. 
The sweetest sound ever known. 
The sound of I AM.

Unmasked

My flesh on some days feels like a casket that my soul carries,
Sometimes I feel like a pall bearer, singing dirges as I stride, wondering,
Does anyone see me, or are they too busy carrying caskets of their own to notice mine?
Within the metaphors can they hear the fellowship of an eager soul, whispering scripture as its daily bread; anticipating the burial of its self just so that it may finally be allowed to live?
Some days I fear my pores may be the victim of a planned escape,
That one day in the presence of many, my soul will force itself out through my pores.
Maybe that is what it would take for this flesh to finally be seen as the coffin it is.
This coffin made lies became my finger prints; blinded by falsehood so myopia became my retinal scan.
I could not access any doors unless my soul hid so far down that truth detectors could not find it.
Many said they could look into my eyes and see my soul,
Not knowing that I was cunning enough to strategically place a portrait of my human self, wide eyed and smiling as my internal screen saver.
I heard many say they love me for who I am but since I didn’t even know who I was, who were they in love with? Maybe the smooth shadows that resembled me,
The ones that everyone loves to play with until they swiftly disappear in the presence of light?
This life sometimes is an act on a stage, so don’t be fooled when you see us dance and move to beats, moving our hands in rhythm as we dissect mere words just so as to magically revive them as similes.
Sometimes our soul sends you Morse code that our flesh cannot decipher so listen, keenly, so that you don’t be fooled because the beats ended eons ago.
Our bodies overheated and broke down from constant gyration, our hands withered in time as our beloved similes re-incarnated to be our own eulogy.
The truth is, all you see is what we show you,
But if many knew that they simply watch a room full of lost souls swinging to the echoes of the tunes and sounds that loneliness plays, they may just take one moment from their clapping and try and resuscitate us with prayer.
If only you knew that the music stopped, and the band left, but we stayed rooted because we had no home apart from the music, you would understand that these caskets our souls carry need to be placed in the ground instead of moving back and forth from being played on loop.
Know now that we have hid this truth, trapping the stench of our hollowness in the perfume of pretense all so that we can stay relevant.
Let this be the day you know that we too, know pain, we too, are carved by blades of hurt, like sculptures,
That we are looking for home but are trapped in the desires to gain mere houses that the world sees as paradise,
That instead of simply rocking stages, we would love to have love instead of the lust we worship through pages and that we may know how it tastes to be free, to be a slave to the freedom of eternity.
So now that the curtains are drawn and you have heard the music stop and you have seen our masks drop as well, have you seen that we are now one and the same?
Have you discovered that we are merely a reflection of each other almost like identical twins exchanging glances from the opposite side of a window pane?
The cap has now fallen and the director has yell cut. The editor has left his work and the make-up washed off.
The script has been lost for good.
What then shall we be to you now?
Kings or pawns and will these chess boards stay on?
You say you love us, what side do you love?
Will you still sing our songs and read our poems when we find out who we really are?
Or will you shut your doors and bolt your ears?
Whatever the case, what is done is done; I have found an audience of one.
One who heard my soul and plucked it from despair,
One who saw my casket and laid it down for me, cleaning the bruises unseen.
Now for Him my dance is eternal, my hands renewed and my similes awe at His parables.
He is the beat, He is the tune, and for Him, I save my eternal applauds.

Have you seen my soul?

Have you seen my soul?
Somewhere along the way I lost it: Lost it in the alleyways of this cold world.
I tried constantly to not be real and so I took a con- form of myself
To try and conform to self but I only ended up misplacing myself- ish
And that was selfish to my soul for like an éclair the sweetest part of me was within
And yet I tried so hard to color up and package my hard exterior just to diffuse your senses from excavating what I had inside, a treasure.
And just like this world the deepest part of me, the flame of who I am is within,
But just like environmental degradation plaguing the earth,
The trash and junk that I easily synchronized with my flesh started to seep slowly into my soul
And the flame of who I am was suppressed, even more; it robbed the life from my cells
And logically the only outcome would be that even if I sprayed 6 liters of the best cologne,
You would still smell my soul stink.
Have you seen my soul?
I deliberately hid it when I was asked if I had one.
I held it by its mouth and told it not to make a sound or otherwise I would exile it away forever.
It tried to breathe but instead I used up all the life intended for it
It tried to eat and yet all I left it were crumbs of daily I’m sorries and I will change notes stuck by its bed.
I never took time to build it but instead I had all the time in the world to intoxicate it with venom that even snakes would quiver when asked to harbor in their fangs.
Daily I would drag my soul on a leash through the alleyways that it begged me never to pass through.
In the presence of my fellow hollow beings we exchanged stories that with each utterance, we could see our chained souls drained of their life.
We desired to be masters of ourselves for the world had numbed our souls to the point the only feeling we believed we could feel was if we numbed our souls even more.
I was nothing but flesh.
I could feel my bones whistle sad tunes as I walked with my unconscious soul lying on my arm like a waiter’s towel

All of a sudden my arm felt light.
My soul was gone.
I ran back to the alleyways but my fellow hollow beings did not recognize me.
The alleyways spat me out with the force of hands like logs that mercilessly performed the Heimlich maneuver on a child.
I then realized that my soul is what made these hollow beings recognize me.
It had fought to its very last to make me visible in a sightless world.
I now had nothing without my soul.
I had to find my soul.
I traversed every land that I thought my soul would hide but just realized I was looking in places where my flesh would hide instead.
For the first time even my hollowness felt hollow and I let the sleep carry me along the sewers that my flesh had come to love.
I now knew the feel of soulless tears on scarred flesh.
When I awoke, something felt different.
I could see beyond what my eyes had been trained to. Those tears had triggered a cleansing.
I saw the leaves dance and flowers move gracefully just as a father teaches his daughter how to dance for the very first time.
I did not understand this but yet it understood me.
I realized that it could have only been a language of praise in thanksgiving for their existence.
Who then were they praising for it was not themselves like we hollow beings were used to.
Why was it so beautiful? They told me to follow their tune of praise and as I did I could no longer deny who I was and why I was.
As soon as my flesh succumb I heard a victory cry and my legs yielded and ran to a field where I saw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.
There I found my soul, swaying like the leaves and dancing like the flowers, praising one other than itself
And I saw you Lord, and in finding my soul, I found you.
The most beautiful sight my eyes had ever seen.

A poem from a soul from a Ghetto

This is is a song from a soul from a 'ghetto' searching,
not knowing for what but searching, believing there has to be something better than this.
These are the fingerprints from impoverished flesh,
as they scribble unseen riddles on schorched neglected pages.
Such is like my soul,
it feels blank, ravaged,
like dust fleeing the molested libraries of Alexandria.
This is a poem from a soul from a 'ghetto' writing, humming to unexisting tunes, tunes only made from the hunger pangs of the mind as starvation from truth creates beats and melodies of unconquered nothingness.
This imaginary crown of thorns kisses my forehead softly, so softly that drop by drop, humble blood travels as if romantically upon the land of my pores, in dual perfection.
Celibate thoughts have entangled my utopia in unforgiving tentacles.
What then shall be of my 'beyond the clouds' beliefs?
What then of my kissing the stars and crying tears as radiant as the midnight moon to be wiped away by fingers soft like heavens cheeks?
What then of this dry soul that knows no rain, one trapped between poisoned dreams and intriguing nightmares?
Grace, i watch you keenly, as you glide through the hallways of the wind.
Clad white, soul light, mind peace, a true souls soul.
My breath pauses, as sin itself is in the breathing of your air.
You see through the masquearade ball of my emotions, even when i hide myself behind the strings of the very mask i adorn.
Oh Grace, it is hard for the soul to stay warm when trapped in frozen flesh and this world hath cast its glacial rebuke.
Beleagured bodies and manacled minds scar succeptible souls suddenly, slowly seething scathing schemes, just to escape this labyrinth called life.
So we search, we search for our souls among the dust the wind declined to carry and among the burst raindrops that heaven declined to hold.
This is a poem from a soul, a soul that before today knew not how a true soul feels like.

Of days and nights of old

These hands are not worthy.
These eyes are not gracious enough to glance at the presence of grace itself.
This mind is too rigid. Too hard to manoeuvre imagination through overwrought tunnels of thought.
Trapped by the bars of self gratitude, these freezing walls close in to numb even the warmest of hearts.
I have not chosen this path.
This hollowness eats me.
So hollow i have become until i hear the echo of my heartbeat as it fights, claws to tear past my eardrums like slaves tunneling from missisipi to try and unearth a radiant future ahead.
Sunlight...
This hollowness gnaws beyond my flesh and disecting the marrow of my soul.
It taunts me.
It sparks my emotions like ciggarette burners and slowly separates the actions of my mind from those of my heart like chaff from grain.
Nursed to the rythm of pain, i knew the milk from the breasts of the world was poison and i had my immeasurable share.
My fingers know not what is real anymore.
I stroke the wind, trap emotions in my palm but the feel of the skin of a truthful woman evade me.
Truthful love evades me.
My fingers have stopped believing.
I knew what truth once tasted like. It tasted like freedom.
I knew how freedom tasted as i had tasted all other things this world paraded and they all tasted the same, until i tasted love.
Love felt like the clouds.
Beautiful and free but with the turn of an emotion, this...love, tore off its tumultuous mask to turn dark and savage.
How then is the taste of true love? How fresh shall its feel be compared to.
Is it as grave as those who fell by its kiss proclaim?
Is it as eloquent as distant authours and suitors profess? What then can i say of my feeble soul and heart as they stare sitting by the window of nostalgia.
This hollowness is a cancer that eats all emotion.
I have not chosen this path.
Love seems to turn the other cheek with a glance at my truth.
Can we say then that love and truth can not coincide?
Like poles of the soul?
I am at awe.
This hollowness eats me.

My sweet new jerusalem

By heavens gates we rest our souls,tired from mortal life.By heavens gates we rest.Yonder we gazed as the horizon of our new jerusalem dawned,pathways crowned in heavenly gold,paved with rubies and sapphires.Barefoot by the shores of the sea of heaven,with the soft sand kissing my feet.Bathed in audacious beauty,almost to a blinding effect.Caressed by the warm winds as we relax to the sounds of the harp of David.Inevitably relaxed i feel.I breathe easy,i rest easy,i live easy.The skies give way,as if to give a bow.They beckon me home,they demand my joining themReluctantly it all begins to fade,slowly,the relaxation turns to distress,the breaths become more shaky,The harps of David cease and the skies swallow me.My sad state of helplesness dwindles,and reality finally sets in.I find myself in an oasis of confusion,sinking in shallow waters,blinding beauty banished,exchanged for stinging horryfing hallucinations.I wake up,and find myself watching helplessly,as what i felt completed me,evaded me once more.You walked away,and called me back to reality.Reality that our mortal life is not paved with rubbies,sapphires,diamonds and gold,but with smiles,giggles,holding of hands and eye kisses,with frowns made to look the other way,with tears wiped,not just by hand but by heart.I realised too late,that these are what mattered,i realised too late that it was not just the horizon of new jerusalem that captured me,but better yet that you were my new jerusalem in your audacious beauty,and it was you that blinded me.Now as the music stops and the sun permanently sets,leaving night to haunt,i lay watching,as my new jerusalem slips away,beyond my reach,never to be grasped again.

My sweet new jerusalem

By heavens gates we rest our souls,tired from mortal life.By heavens gates we rest.Yonder we gazed as the horizon of our new jerusalem dawned,pathways crowned in heavenly gold,paved with rubies and sapphires.Barefoot by the shores of the sea of heaven,with the soft sand kissing my feet.Bathed in audacious beauty,almost to a blinding effect.Caressed by the warm winds as we relax to the sounds of the harp of David.Inevitably relaxed i feel.I breathe easy,i rest easy,i live easy.The skies give way,as if to give a bow.They beckon me home,they demand my joining themReluctantly it all begins to fade,slowly,the relaxation turns to distress,the breaths become more shaky,The harps of David cease and the skies swallow me.My sad state of helplesness dwindles,and reality finally sets in.I find myself in an oasis of confusion,sinking in shallow waters,blinding beauty banished,exchanged for stinging horryfing hallucinations.I wake up,and find myself watching helplessly,as what i felt completed me,evaded me once more.You walked away,and called me back to reality.Reality that our mortal life is not paved with rubbies,sapphires,diamonds and gold,but with smiles,giggles,holding of hands and eye kisses,with frowns made to look the other way,with tears wiped,not just by hand but by heart.I realised too late,that these are what mattered,i realised too late that it was not just the horizon of new jerusalem that captured me,but better yet that you were my new jerusalem in your audacious beauty,and it was you that blinded me.Now as the music stops and the sun permanently sets,leaving night to haunt,i lay watching,as my new jerusalem slips away,beyond my reach,never to be grasped again.