Some Things Are Too Big to Be Said

Nothing can express
the insurmountable weight in my chest
that chokes me with rage and
leaves me low for days
when a beautiful woman turns
and says
a deep dark wish
to have straighter hair like mine,
or colored eyes,
and centuries-old longing
to be "White" just like
Massah
told her he is
and she ain't.

Without Rosey-Red-Colored Glasses

No more heroic boasting war stories
Told on tapestries dripping with gory past
No more elegiac soldier-ballads
Recounted in engorged poetics of translated Classics
One glimpse at the world today
Brings all you need to know of glorified violence
One glimpse at the world today
Shows all you need to know of unsung after-effects
And the humanity they vainquish in their conquests.

Post-Modernism's Blues

Proud and stubborn as a Creole I defiantly claim:
That my words could never be confined by your stanzas!
But then, wanting to be you, I arbitrarily assign them,
not knowing the rules and not caring to learn them
and so I stumble and flounder and pause and stutter
while others call it genius with me left empty,
defeated,
feeling the charade of my blunders.
Willfully holding on
to an imagined prowess and sporadic applause
I stutter
and stumble
and pause
and flounder
and call it genius
along with a small group of others.