Pivoting on awareness back when we got the fades with the banana parts
He’s spinning at the top of the steps clutching the banister in grandma’s house
Rounding down a stairwell missing steps (up the hill)
The probabilities
The dice (down the hill)
Histories of children in a war on drugs in the 5th grade before Baldwin,
We learned enough to d.a.r.e against our hunger
The chances
We could spot the first con, blowing dust off the sensor for Crash Bandicoot
A pivot from Contra cartridges learning of cointelpro and later lessoned contradictions of memecoin “precedents”
Flipping faces
Spinning disks
Updated my drive lens
Alert enough to spot red or blue
and know the wings fly the same
Unobstructed and free redefined liberty or death unless the hue is not Haiti
We learned
Even before we were allowed to read las letras ilegal
Este pendejo no sabe nada
Banning books
Patriots
The ballot
The bullet
The battle of church and a state
Tech and influence
Entertainment and soft power
Demand engineering
Are we in a burning building or building bunkered nations within a native land crumbling transgressing testing its limits?
I’ll-go-rhythm
What of freedom are we talking?
History claiming, history erasing tightrope to rewrite the curriculum for fugitive pedagogy
Dunbar, Ellison, Angelou, Morrison,
My 7th grade social studies teacher Mr. Baldwin begs the question and the room falls silent
His eyes wide open during reading comprehension
Finally a smirk on his face as I answer
Excitement & critical explosion of a 7th grade logic, he knows I’ve got it, his smirk breaks into a smile, I reply,
“This man is, invisible”
He claps his hands once, awakening the rest of the class and I think,
A caged bird battling it out
Beating bloody wings of identity,
For what?
For what?
Minnesota to Florida to Canada to Colombia
What I saw in Kenya reset the system again
Pivoting from perception to policy to reality
To realize a tired doctrine of fear
Pivoting towards a positive aggression
Radically creative like
Black boy joy,
Black billboards, magazines, matters of the heart and scope of vision
I will hike to create space as a man who enjoys beauty until he must break teeth in the age of war,
Roll up his sleeves and die
The pistol is in her purse and she understands the mission
The forms
Like pain coming from people closest
Las cosas de la vida
La pivote de la lengua
Perdido, pensando y pasando el mismo calle
Otra vez on purpose
La transición, the reps
Domestic dialect didactic back to my attention
In neighborhoods where, “they’ll kill you!”
And questions of, “how did you learn like that?”
Backhanded compliments South of Ocala like, “how is it you know things?”
I turn again and pivot
Loosen my tongue and let fly like
learning English for the fourth time
A mistaken Cubano walking South in the Yucatán
Reincarnated I have lived here before…
