• main
  • PHOTO PORTFOLIO
  • REELS

MICHELLE RENEE JACKSON

Award-Winning Artist

  • main
  • PHOTO PORTFOLIO
  • REELS

AFRICA’S SON

Africa’s son

I see you disguised in that oversized white T

But why settle to be another Jay Z

When you might possibly be the next W.E.B Dubois?

 

What can I do to help you quiet the noise of the well-intentioned little black boys?

Who, like crabs in a barrel, love to live in peril

Who would rather lay in bed getting head

Making you think that they were actually getting ahead 

 

And then I read that these dead men tried to pull you down

Tried to break your crown and your spirit

Why?

Because you simply would not hear it

Because you dared to see a destiny passed Pico and Normandie boulevard

And believe me, I know that it’s hard

For a black man to walk while scarred 

But you fool yourself if you think that it is not essential and perhaps even inconsequential

For you to force the world to acknowledge your potential

And to perceive you as more than just a destined black athlete

 

And that boulder on your shoulder forces you to look older

As you swagger aggressively down the street

Passed that woman whom you’ll never meet

Who clutches her purse

I observe and even I feel worse

Because I know that Africa’s son has finally begun to succumb to the lies that we have fed you from within

That some how God’s sin resulted in our black skin 

 

So baby we need repentance

Because we have contributed to your sentence

The psychological warfare on the young black man’s mind is, indeed, our failing

And I am convinced it is the reason for your internal ailing

An audacious sickness that says if you walk out that door

You will most likely be one of four

Destined to be another failed incarcerated black man’s bitch.

And then I wonder which

Position you would rather be

His penetrator or his penetrate-ee

 

And I pray to God that that is truly not your destiny

Hoping that eventually you finally uncover the conduit

That teaches you how to ditch this shit of depressed geographical entrapment   

 

That you would finally push away your mother’s tit,

And embrace solid food,

And call it crude but you need something of meatier substance

Because your molars and sharp-ass bicuspids

Leave your mother bleeding as a result

But that is the consequences of suckling an adult. 

 

Baby I am longing for the day

When you finally wake up and say

Enough is enough

You are a prince, therefore you are a king in the making

No longer is your life ours for the taking 

 

© 2024 Simuel + Murray LLC New York | Los Angeles yoohoo@simuel-murray.com 310-307-0269