Category Archives: Blogs

08.20.12
by

Before the Fall

I remember those days before sex was required in a relationship. I even recall those days when I was too shy to kiss my girlfriend. She was very dark, very beautiful, very hard, very thick, very graceful, and very smart. She was in the 8th grade and I was in the 7th and one day she began telling her friends at school that I was her boyfriend. She was so shapely and so popular that I couldn’t disagree, thus our relationship became official. But then what is a 13-year-old boy supposed to do with his girlfriend when he only sees her at school?

I knew what my friends wanted me to do to her. The same thing that they claimed to do with their girlfriends but I didn’t really want to. For some reason it seemed like such a rather vile thing to do to a girl who I actually liked. So I walked her to class. I waddled behind her while wrapping my arms around the front of her ribcage, like teenage boys tend to do with their girlfriends, and I placed myself against her perfectly rotund backside. That may have well been sex because that was as far as we ever took it. I enjoyed telling my friends that she belonged to me. I enjoyed her glances and stares from across the hallway. I loved the way she used to gel her hair back over a scrungy in a style the girls used to call “a freeze.”

Her image would come to me at night and I so appreciated how she always pleased me in my dreams so that I would wake up sticky and excited. I saved the gum wrapper that she wrote her number on even though I had known it by heart for months (568-8125). I bought her a Jessica Rabbit card for Valentines Day and I even let her wear my San Jose Sharks Starter jacket a few times during the winter. To say that I was enamored would be an understatement.

To be able to transcend a crush and actually attain a girlfriend as an adolescent boy was sweeter than life itself. This was before pregnancies, before heartache, before trauma, before pressure, before infidelity, before promiscuity; this was before the corrosive power of sex. This was before the fall.

YB

08.18.12
by

We All Make Mistakes

I approached her skeptically fearing that she was the type of woman who was insanely in love with the idea of being in love thus reducing her man to some kind of weak representation of what she thought love should be like. I never made love to her. When we walked together I stepped very lightly because I was afraid that the conviction of my natural gait would draw too much attention to the reality of the situation. The reality being that our situation was hopeless. I took a chance on a woman from another planet because I have failed so many times here on Earth and in the end I still managed to be left alone.

I would rather be enamored with an inanimate object than with someone who can grow to hate me so definitively.  I like acoustic guitars because I can’t figure them out and they slow down my spiritual tide. When I hear beautiful music playing I am able to forget about all the time I have wasted on unwholesome things. I have to remind myself that I am a good man but even still sometimes I do way too much. Unfortunately I make a lot of mistakes but then we all do. Don’t we?

YB

08.07.12
by

We Speak of Ghosts

If a man has the constant feeling that everyone in the world is trying to kill him then he is probably a paranoid schizophrenic, however, if that man is black then he is merely a realist. A few months ago a childhood friend of mine was shot and killed at 5:00am at a traffic light. He just finished working a double shift at his job and was headed home and someone killed him. As far as facts are concerned that’s the end of the story. People on the streets say there was some kind of verbal altercation or that somehow jealousy was involved but it doesn’t matter. None of the gossip concerns me, what keeps me up at night is that Ronnie Kidd is dead.

“The Kidd” “Kidder” the dude who cried every week when we were playing Peewee Football because the coaches wouldn’t let him play defense is gone. The guy with the jokes, the style, and the always-positive outlook on life was killed over something that no man should ever die over.  He had a wife, three boys, and friends everywhere. He wasn’t a dope-boy or a thug of any of any kind but yet and still he was gunned down as if his life meant nothing. And of the person who did it; one can assume that he went on about his business. He ate a good breakfast and kissed his woman on the lips.  But a fact even more troubling is that we can definitely assume that his killer was another black man.

I rarely sleep well. I see memories of Ronnie Kidd, I recount deep conversations with Kevin Reese, and I recall cheering for Damion Bouchellion as a JV football player while he led our varsity squad to an undefeated season. I hear Sean Scott’s voice so clearly some nights that I forget that he’s dead. Perhaps I have mental illness or perhaps I have finally become aware that it is perfectly normal for a 30-year-old black man from East Oakland to be far better acquainted with the dead than with the living. I’m not a ghost whisperer and I don’t claim to have super natural abilities but I do talk to spirits. Sometimes they talk back to me and sometimes they don’t. I see them in visions. Sometimes I see them in the form of mischievous boys, sometimes I see them as responsible men, and sometimes I see them lying in pools of blood on the concrete.

I don’t want to be killed. On average I’m sure I think about death a lot more than most educated men.  Sometimes it’s hard to leave the bed and sometimes it’s hard to come home. I know that if I were to accrue the resources necessary to lay on a psychiatrists couch then I would be diagnosed with a lot of afflictions and given a lot of pills but no western medicine or drugs can cure me of my mental blackness. Black men are the most hated species on Earth. Hated so much in fact that we actually hate one another to death.

Over the years I’ve learned that crazy is a relative term and although race is only a social construct it’s confinement is very real. Even if I escaped today my soul would still be in the trap.  I miss my friend’s so much but it’s rare that I drink enough to cry about it.

-YB

08.02.12
by

Retreating

8/02/12

I have become very stressed as of late. This evening I was so worked up that even the steady tide of the Pacific Ocean couldn’t calm me down. I was at the shoreline with another artist. Retreating from murder, retreating from death, retreating from blackness, retreating from myself. But I can never seem to go far enough.

 

-YB

07.20.12
by

Delusions

Anger isn’t very far removed from love. I’m still mad at her, which makes me wonder whether or not I feel deeper than I thought I did. She’s still mad at him which causes me to become suspicious of her. For if she can’t achieve indifference toward him then how could she ever grow to love me?

Some people deal with their insecurities but I don’t. I allow them to accumulate and obscure my vision. I allow them to cause paranoia and delusion. My insecurities give me company when I am alone. They tell me that I wasn’t wrong for leaving that girl. They tell me that if I didn’t leave her then she would have left me. They pick up my phone and send text messages to the easy girl with low expectations. And they whisper into my ear that I’m not violating my humanity but rather I’m only being a man. They tell me this until she’s at my door, on my porch, and then when she comes in they leave. Then after I cum they come back.

They prevent me from feeling weak and irresponsible. They disallow me to feel insecure.

-YB

07.11.12
by

Addicted

The other day I was thinking about this young lady who I used to love a few years back. Of course I never told her I loved her and I have yet to tell her I miss her but such is life. Men play a lot of games.  When she loved me I never felt the need to reciprocate and when she was gone I convinced myself that I didn’t care. Then I became lonely.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I would send a text message to myself and in the few seconds between my phone lighting up and vibrating on my pillow and me checking the message I would lead myself to believe it was she.  That she had once again disregarded her pride to fall back in love with me. In those moments I would get a rush similar to the feeling that a gambler gets while the dice are still in motion, or that of a junky when he finally finds a vein. Then, of course, I would look at my phone and see my own name. Me, by myself, in a bed, in a house, and in a world that could never love me.  Even if the world wanted to love me I wouldn’t know how to give it back. I am programmed to only appreciate what is ugly.

People from the ghetto aren’t used to having nice things.  Her heart was new when I first got it so I had to break it in. I had to bring it down to my standards but somewhere during the process she resisted. She refused to be slowly worn down like a new apartment complex in the hood, or robbed into bankruptcy like a new business. She refused to be pissed on like a playground. She wouldn’t allow the windows to her soul to be busted, and she would not be gentrified by the likes of me.

In essence she escaped.  Before she left she asked me if I wanted to come along but I, like a brainwashed slave afraid to leave the plantation, refused. I told her that this poverty was all I know, and grimaced as I slammed the trap door shut in her face.

There is no addiction worse than this man’s addiction to misery. There is nothing more confounding, nothing more pathetic, and nothing more consuming. Broken homes lead to broken hearts and broken souls that would rather not love.

There is nothing cool about the ghetto. We should never envy inequality in matters of the heart.

-YB

07.04.12
by

You Need to be at this Event! BEASTCRAWL 7/7/12

Hella SOULFUL 7/7/12

Trust me when I tell you this is the ONLY place to be at 8:00pm on Saturday July 7th if you love good soulful, spiritually uplifting, Baycentric, culturally relevant, dynamic, and downright beautiful poetry and prose.

Join host Roger Porter at “Hella Soulful” for Leg 3 of Beast Crawl. Trust and believe it will be the hippest literary trip in America. The Hella Soulful train is coming on July 7th so drop your worries on the floor and catch it! Whooot! Whoooot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-DpRcxK_N8

The readers:

Safiya Martinez is a playwright, poet, performer and educator. She is currently working on a one-woman show entitled “So You Can Hear Me” about being a first-year teacher in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She has performed her self-produced works in New York City and the Bay area.

Mica Valdez is a native, mixedblood, two spirit artist working on indigenous global issues to effect social change and protect mother earth. Check out her anthology:http://machafemme.tumblr.com/

Maisha Z. Johnson lifts up silenced voices through her poetry and on her blog, Inkblot, where she writes about the relationship between writing and social change. She is earning an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University.

i.Ameni and his jazzynastyfunkyfolkyhopopindiesoul amalgamates his many flavors into a one-derful sound. Fierce and tender, pure hearted and soulful, he peers into the ugly and the beauty of this world and invites us to consciously create a new one together. Music that slaps, invites your creative intellect, and speaks to your heart all in one.

Nathan Jones is a poet, storyteller, novelist, journalist, a hip-hop enthusiast, and the author of several books, which includes: Revolutionary Erotica, a collection of poetry; the Novel, Black Man in Europe, and Excerpts from My Soul: Read Without Prejudice. Nathan holds an MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, and is currently an English instructor at Skyline College.


Jessica Dailey is a deep, chocolate, thoughtful, militant, cool ass, round the way girl that keeps them grounded. She graduated with her MFA in poetry from Mills College in 2009.

07.01.12
by

Strong Enough to be Vulnerable

 

 

There are few things in this world that I find to be more endearing than a vulnerable woman. Perhaps this is because I have been socialized to ignore all of my weaknesses; therefore I have grown to be easily enticed by a creature that is conditioned to embrace such feelings. I hear a lot of men speak of wanting a strong black woman and I know a lot of women who go out of their way to be viewed as such but I think that’s a problem.

 

Why can’t a black woman be a lady first? I have been through enough to be strong for both of us. I am drawn to women who are unafraid to be beautiful and who dare to be feminine in a culture where everyone wants to be a man. I suppose there should be some amount of shame associated with my wanting a woman who will cry the tears that I have unlearned how to let go. However, if my views are a little outdated then so be it. I’m a man who knows what he wants and I love a woman who knows what she is.

 

-YB

06.25.12
by

Her

Is there such a thing as respecting a woman too much? In my life I have known a few women who I have been afraid to touch. I have known women who I have placed way above sex. It wasn’t until I was very set in my manhood that I was able to accept the fact that sometimes conversation is enough. Sometimes a look can be enough, or a smile, or a walk, or a drop of her own perspiration beading up in the middle of her dark cleavage.

 

It doesn’t happen very often but every now and again I can find contentment in restraint. Sometimes it feels good to be chosen and I cherish the fact that I know I can so I never do. I hope she understands.

-YB

06.22.12
by

Notes on the Gentrification of Oakland

 

It’s strange to me that it’s now considered cool to live in my hometown of Oakland, CA. When I was growing up it was just dangerous. There were very few young “hip” people who were brave enough to move into an area that was known as one of the most notorious ghettos in the state of California. Even the people who lived there didn’t want to live there. A small two-bedroom house on the Eastside of town was the last place my mother wanted to raise her three children but what else could she do? Housing discrimination was a lot more blatant in the late 1980’s. Meaning no realtor was going to show her a property in Napa or Piedmont.

So we ended up moving to a street that was relatively quiet however trouble was never far away. On every major thoroughfare around our home there was drug dealing and wanton violence. I was only allowed to ride my bike down half of our block. My sister and I often times watched TV on the floor because we heard gunshots outside and didn’t want to get hit by a stray bullet. I witnessed so many crimes against humanity just trying to get from the bus stop to my house that I’m still unable to completely process it. Somewhere along the way Oakland has both traumatized me and desensitized me but now all of a sudden it’s the place to be for young people who want to be involved in some kind of cultural adventure.

I guess my main issue with those hoards of upper-middle class bred white folks who have come to gentrify certain sections of my city is that everything I experienced in Oakland has been real—real death, real poverty, real loss—while what they want to experience seems very superficial. To live in a brand new town home that was erected in a space that used to be a housing project while telling your friends that you stay in the ghetto is tantamount to a person going on a Safari and saying that they braved the harsh jungles of Africa. I feel like some of these people are trying to capitalize off of my pain and it makes me nauseous. There is way too much dried blood on the streets of this town for people to act like it’s charming. I don’t think they’ll ever understand.

-YB