As I navigate the world I feel the burdens of my darkness making every step nearly impossible. Eventually I become overwhelmed so I stop to sort things out. And then when I stop everything is gone. As soon as I stop moving, the puzzle pieces disintegrate then they disappear and I am left with an empty box and no chance at putting it all together. It is in this sense that rest becomes an oasis. For every time I go to sleep I wake up knowing that true rest doesn’t exist. How can a man wake up feeling tired yet he has nowhere to be?
The voices that speak to me are barely audible and when I try to listen to them they flee. I keep telling myself that I should be grateful but I am not because I know that I have lost something very essential to my being. And that is the ability to assemble love from blocks of depression. For so many years I have been able to duck right before capitalism beheaded me. I have been able to go deep inside of myself and mine for solace until I reached my quota. I have, in the past, been able to keep my muse from moving but now she runs. I am hideous. I am pathetic. I am lost.
You can’t pay me for my identity. I’m not going to sell my dreams for an office with my name on the door. My life is haunted by struggle. Whenever I get my hands on money, poverty beckons. The Trap tells me to come back home. Indeed I never left. Poverty is when you let an outside entity tell you who you are and even worse, what you should strive to become. I live my life the eternal outsider, never interested in opening the door, never in the middle of the dance floor, never a member of the rank and file.
Let them distance themselves from me and I will feed off of their repulsion. Let me be young and black, let me be the ghetto sun that provides the heat and the fire and always rises. Let me be misunderstood. Let me be crazy. I want the voices in my head to trust me again. Trust that I will never betray them, that I will depict them accurately. That I will never place any occupation before them ever again. That I will never pursuit ungodly things before I have first given you life. I will accept your anger, your screaming, and your rage if only you will speak to me. For without your presence in my soul I am an ordinary man. A worker. A follower. A completely disposable human being. A wasted dream. This time around you won’t have to chase me down after work. This time I will come to you.
-YB