Sleepless nights

I awake drenched in hot sweat. My heart beats wildly inside my chest. I try to bring my racing thoughts to a pause, but my attempts to pacify my nighttime terrors prove futile.

I stumble to the bathroom and throw cold water on my face. I take a couple of deep breaths to reconnect to reality.

After sixty seconds or so, I regain a semblance of composure. I reach for a towel and dry off my face. I look up in the mirror and get a glimpse of the man that transformed my dreams into nightmares.

Tears well up and cascade down my cheeks as the reflections are laced with reminiscences of past violence that is cruelly scarred on my face.

I quickly look away from the mirror in which the wounded child within peers out to present day struggles through the eyes of a shaken man, a haunted man, a man without resolve; the man who is me.

Shaken but not stirred, I stammer back to bed. I try frantically to repress harrowing childhood memories far below consciousness without much success. Alas, childhood agonies remain ravenously alive inside my mind's eye.

With eyes wide open, I don’t see any restive sleep obtained this night. As usual, my day begins...

Conscience silenced

Impoverished peoples baited by illicit temptations
Pauses in moral hesitation before engaging in transgression
Perplexity abounds in life changing contemplation

Heed to virtue or delve into vice
Right or wrong is void in changing status quo
A call to conscience fails to suffice

A nine to five brings blood to a boil
Criminal history leaves future job prospects foiled
Slaving for pennies, drudgery in broil

Money, power, and respect
Craving immediate ascension in netherworld success
Easily obtained through drugs, guns, and sex

Liquor stores, Cell phone stores, Gun stores
Languishing on the maligned corners that plague the poor

Vagabonds beg for change in hoards
Prostitutes sell their product at the door
Affront of the myriad check cashing stores

The poor have few means for social success
Advantages and opportunities are nothing but less

Tumultuous conscience compartmentalized
Actions, legal or illicit, rationalized
Big profits recycled and capitalized

Loss of love, life, and liberty comes at a price
No matter the means of fortune and prominence
roll the dice, pick your vice: jail, death, or financial dominance

To be continued...

Frustrated...

Pen clutched tightly
Notebook in hand
Attempt to write knightly

Words betray my thoughts
Fingers twisted in knots
Can’t seem to write for naught

Desire verse compulsion
I’m lost in the confusion
Writings resemble vile repulsions

Hand cramps in hesitation
Ink leaks onto the pad
Paper stained with stagnation

Ideas recoil in fright
Derision from my peers in sight
Motivation runs dry and takes flight

Cap my pen
Close my note book
Tomorrow I will try to write again…

Write... write... write

Do I write about education?
Do I write about the penitentiary?
Do I write about redemption?
Do I write about society’s newfound slavery?
Do I write about a morally decaying nation?
Do I write about personal futility?
Do I write about illusionary freedoms?
Do I write about the pen’s utility?
Do I write about talent lost to procratination?
Do I write about swinging pedulums and dichotomy?
Do I write about being second class?
Do I write about civil invisibility?
Do I write about what I know?
Do I write for an audience?
Do I write for a show?
Do I write for a fee?
Do I write to set myself free…

Do what you have to do to rid yourself from your fear of me...

Marginalize me
Categorize me
Stereotype me
Prejudice me
Label me
Typecast me
Penalize me
Criminalize me
Ostracize me
Disenfranchise me
Institutionalize me
Imprison me

However, you will never hold dominion over me...

titleless

Inauthenticity breeds mindless conformity
Strict conventionality begets imbecility
Group-think is fraught with impropriety
Controled thinking is a injustice to humanity

American Caste System

Enslave the different covertly
Build new prisons prolifically

Slavery is big industry
Enforced servitude revisited
Profiting off human suffering done easily

The second class relish in poverty
They are devoid of proper propriety
The have-nots don’t deserve life's delicacies

Can’t you see?

There is no moral penalty
Only pockets brimming with monies

Don’t scoff and sneer in disdain!
Status quo unchanged

The haves are providing a charity
Shelter and food are a gift
Not a callous penalty

Preserve the elite’s plight
The homogenized reek of conventional strife

throw away the jailer’s key
Imprison the different
People who resemble me

Free thinking begets debased penalties
Unforgetable barbaric whippings

Drop to your knees
Take your lashings
Or be lynched
Left dangling from a red oak tree

Naked back expose past revolts
Wounds scarred over bespeak tales of repulse

Cat-o-nine tips tear through hardened skin
Blood pools beneath tortured feet akin

Deceptive I am not
Authentic I am
Put my beliefs through a noose
Choke out my values with society’s self-righteous knot

I remain silent, as the whip screams
Body destroyed, but mind remains keen

Conscience rendered undisturbed
Die on the feet and not on the knees--perturbed

I am string-less
Quasi-conformist out of social convenience
Beat into indifference, yet remain maskless
There is no common thread between us

A societal clone I will never be
warehoused, caged, beaten while incarcerated
I will remain comfortably enveloped in transparency
Unadulterated, pure, and spiritually free

outKast

Outcasts are habitually marginalized
Forced to obey hallow standards moralized
Aberrant behaviors pathologized
Constrained in a cell to be psychologically terrorized
Strapped to a bed in four-points to be legally narcotized
Imprisoned for life--institutionalized
Society left distilled, bland, sterilized