most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps

i wonder what it'll take to recreate public enemy's "fight the power" video? there are many events that mark specific defining moments in one's life. that video really meant a lot to me. it brought light to feelings and thoughts i had held about the world as i knew it at that point. and as comfortable as i am giving speeches, i am equally uncomfortable. i enjoy being calm as much as possible, because it helps me to collect my thoughts. some folks and even family don't take to well to such nonchalance. it's unfortunate when they take it personal, but oh well. yet i think it was this video that caused some nerve ending to flip out, causing any words that flow from my lips that have a specal meaning or connection to my life's story behind it, i get a little choked up. i can't even describe it, but it's a weird semi-tear-jerker type of voice-over that i never have full control of. Ask any of the 1000+ heads who were in Anaheim in 2003. no control whatsoever. it is what it is.

for anyone from the other 49 states, hearing that I'm from South Carolina usually is marked with an explicit indication of surprise, as though I should have either been lynched already or that it was remarkable that I spoke proper English and knew how to count (yes, count, not even calculus, son.)

but anyways. i can recall being a child and straddling the fence of love versus hate. fear and fate. looking grim circumstances in the eye, yet seeing the (cliched by now because i overuse it) beauty in the hideous. I'll readily admit that there are some things that a child should not be exposed to and so I hope I can shelter the midget as much as I can, without giving him a false reality of what the real-world really entails.

but i am proud of some of the stances i took as a little boy in light of what was going on then to which I've managed to hold on steadastly to this day. i can even recall the demands i made of my father one particular summer that he HAD to take me to the midtown Manhattan offices of the African National Congress. just because. And all the medallions and t-shirts I used to collect on Fulton and Broadway in BK. And now, many moons and movements later, I pray the midget makes similar demands of me.

so the next poem i write will read like a will. or maybe it'll be more like an epilogue. to bring closure to where i am as a person up to this point and a starting ground from here on out.

it's a long way to go when you don't know where you're going
you don't know where you're going when you're lost

fuq it. i'll make my own directions