• You hear others speak about things you can't think about and read and write around the truth they've found within the mouth of vomit-spewing society, left in a daze of denied notoriety while everything they say is lost in the haze of necromantic dreamers bringing back what slacked to the grave seven years ago with the Twin Towers, sixty years ago with World War II, and a hundred forty years ago with non-American Africans.

    Some poets flow out like toxic sludge what listeners eat up like special fudge brownies because they don't want to hear what's so real that even I, a creature of power, a creature of dance, rhythm, and words who listens and feels what's wrong and absurd, cannot approach too near, hear too close the ropes tying a noose of words that tighten and choke until one day I stoke enough flames to burn it off and leave that emblazoned, pink scar because I'm afraid of the chains society's lain on them and the silk they made of that malicious metal that they share so fervently and so desperately with anyone who will listen and not only understand but not walk away.

    The real ones wrap up the words of a lifetime into a three minute rhyme and take line after line after line after line to explicate and interrogate and examine and ram every truth you're too bland to taste into a soap-coated candy apple in ways that make me shiver in my seat as they deliver heat burning Hell out of its place, be the Beast in the ghetto or the podium or the sands of imperialism and religious dogmatic murder from all sides, white and yellow and black and shining a mirror reflection of his smiling face back as a confession that we are not perfect human beings and more than that, it's not enough just to say it, to admit you're not perfect because every time you nod your "Amen!" and your "Preach it!" and your "Mm-hmm!" or clap your hands to the beat of a street-pastor's rhythm, on the inside you apply what you know is a lie to every soul who is not the beholder’s.

    After they're done, my face is still quivering and my feet won't stand because every time I'm like a puppet with my strings cut; what I've built up is lost because they are the blade who strips the bark from a human being and lobotomizes a skull to pull out raw nerves so they can lay down the steel of screaming dignity in the dirt of your mind, who scalp a face to set free to run what's hidden behind the fortress they carve like butter, bone walls and rigid philosophy bent to breaking by combined pressure of slicing lines and exploding fire, detonating into fractions what I thought I believed and running down into my socks so they're so soaked I can't ignore them when I take 'em off later that night and it leaves my feet stained when I walk so people can see the footsteps of someone who was cut by the blade of a poet, who knows it, and who tries his best to show it so that one day, he can be one of the blades who stab the heart of the Beast and set us to run free without needing mirrors because we can finally see.