Black Poetry : How Thin The Line

And as he imagined his forefathers must have done--while watching their
own people brutalized--he would bite his own tongue until it bled. He figured,
every time they were cornered and forced to choose between themselves
and those others (that were really their own) something somewhere inside
of them bled--it had to. Wasn't he also "those others"? Wasn't he now
cornered and being asked to choose between his dreams and her reality?
Wasn't that the same as being forced to watch and participate in his own
mutilation? Even though a monsoon of emotion swelled inside him, he had
learned, as his forefathers had learned, to wear a look of indifference. Even
while that monsoon desperately searched his soul, commingling and
conspiring with anything on its way out; and promising to gush past any and
all boundaries, his eyes would stick to their story; his Grandfather had
showed him how to do that by, simply, surviving Alabama.

And now, so many years later, he had found his own Jim Crow, holding
her whip between her legs, while aggressively and methodically thrusting her
full body to her own syncopated rhythm; grinding away his resistance and his
outrage in measured strokes of 1, 1-2, 1, 1-2, 1. She had become his
limitation; his oppression; his low-hanging iron ceiling; his racist judge; his
jury; and his castration. It was her body that blocked the Sun from shining
on him. And now he knew he hated her with all the intensity and contempt
he was certain his Grandfather must have had for the Klan. As he held her in
his arms, he grappled with the notion that what he had mistook for love all
this time, was really hate; and how thin the line must be between.

This was FANTASTIC!

The 1st stanza reminded me of "We Wear The Mask."

And the 2nd stanza also reminds me of another poet; but it escapes me just now.


However, NO slight or disrespect meant to you by that. I was moved by your words and my mind took me to poems with a similar effect on me.

But, you're a gifted storyteller in verse!

dear poet...

very well written...this piece is. hey, can you hear that??? that's me clapping in the background, there. keep scribin'! i'm lovin' it!

That's interesting.. and I appreciate the comparison. It's an honor for my
work to even be mentioned in the same paragraph as Paul Laurence
Dunbar's. He died over 100 years ago but his words are still on the tips of
folks tongues.. that's something.. 100 years later??!! Thanks again.