What Can We Do But Watch?

Complacency runs rampant by youth in America, me included.  I believe that instead of standing against inequality my generation is complacent with it and furthermore I believe many of us are desensitized to the role inequality has globally, nationally, locally, and individually. My generation has so many various media outlets, that the inequality happening throughout the world is constantly being forced down our throats. As result the destruction has become the everyday; as if it is something that cannot be changed or stopped. So when a man sets himself on fire in Libya and groups of people are arrested for treason in Zimbabwe for meeting up to watch videos of the revolution occurring in Egypt it does something worse than fall on deaf ears; it falls on ears that do not believe they can change the situation. These events fall on the ears of complacent people who believe that the way the world works is the only world there is and anything outside of that is irrational.

So what can we do but watch as the Middle East and the continent of Africa are being swept over (or is a cleansing effect) by a sea of revolutionaries. People demanding for a change far beyond that of what Obama preached during his campaign. I read the newspaper and tack online news sources of the events shaping our world and I wonder if the stand against oppression can reach its hands across the ocean and hit the shores of the US.

Ramble over… 

Salt Roads

I haven't written a poem in a while, so I thought what the hell let me post this one. I wrote it a little over three months ago. As Erykah Badu said "keep in mind that I'm an artist and I'm sensitive about my shit."

I wrote this poem while daydreaming in a class. It is based off a book that I pretty much fell in love with called The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson. Get the book, read it, then pass on what you've learned to others.

Salt Roads


We’ve lost ourselves in the oceans
Drifting, our souls left in the water
The salty water
It use to fill our souls

That water once led to Congo beats
And cosmology long past
The water gone
The skin lightened
The hair forced and pressed the water out

Now we are left with roads
Salt roads
Roads once filled with the ocean water that lead to Ibo land, sea
breeze, drum beats and lack of clothing
The water… gone
The clothes cover the body once glorified
Now demonized as, ‘other’
Covered by cloth that dried the water

Now we are left with roads
Salt roads
That use to hold ocean water that lead to lands now forgotten
That led to histories now untold
That led to languages now unspoken
That led to a beauty now unseen