Children Of The Complex

Children of The Complex
The consequence
Of incarcerated daddies
Felony Families
Hush…
Don’t let the neighbors hear
Keep it under your tongue
Like a razor blade
When you’re on edge
When you get the urge to reveal what you feel
Talk about what?
Closed mouths in the mirror breed
A bit of confusion so to speak
Like punishment
For being
For fleeing
For seeing freedom
Within reach

The other side of the law
Out
Of time and money
Honey something was funny
Long before the door slammed shut
Powerless
To see the impotence
To know how the system works
Still fighting to reconcile the hurt
Forgiveness was long ago
But the body knows what it knows
And somehow my insides 
Still writhe and slither
From the truth 
The weight of
The time when…
Go ahead
Try to process with the pen
The dealings with silence
The ways we learned to speak
So as to hide
To not define
The shape of this...
Big grief in little bodies

Two times you come of age
Once when the police knock
Twice when you realize
You thought it was normal day
All along...
The watchtower had a guard in it
To make sure manhood was kept under wraps
Overseer’s life in-tact
So long as those melanated
Can be held back
Down
For ransom
No reason
Just the season
For catchin' niggas’ up
Black
Brown
Close enough
Degrees please
What you thought it would solve?
Smilin' and sayin' cheese
Don’t make assumptions
My life is a blessing
Cobblestone roads
With a terrain only I know

Every drop I’ve earned
The forgiveness
The running
Chasing that silence away
Like a setting sun
Falling to rise
Love on all sides
In and out
Im talking about
Coming of age
In The Complex
A different kind flex
To survive the 
Prison Industrial Train Wreck

But the body remembers
What the mind 
Tries to forget
The maintenance required
To untether and become an outlier
A rebel in motion
Healing from
Dealing with
How we sit with our choices
Many are called
But few are 
Choiceless as an inmate
Like stalemate

I am praying to
Re-awaken those feel-good genes
The joy each chromosome brings
As we silence the unworthy
And tease out the trauma
Maybe we can ease the drama
Of the day
The fight picked
Cuz the ghost of less than
Wouldn’t go away
Children of the complex
Not apartment
An apart 
Meant to destroy
A coming together
Meant to unite
The left and right
The ups and downs 

My body knows
So my soul gives it space
Remember there’s no race
Only time spent
Where do the moments go?
How am I flowing these days?
Can I take responsibility
Or do I blame it on the rain
Streaming down the window
The glass reminiscent
Of the barrier between dad and us
What mistrust was sewn with tiny hands
Pressed against cold glass
No one asked
If I wanted to go

Rewind the memory
Of prison visits
Full of necessary contraband
Like ribs
Greens
Mac n’ cheese
Not the extra bone given to Adam
To make Eve
But the kind you smoke
The kind you eat
The kind that makes you sit and think
All that soul
Can you count
How many days
You have left to go?
Before release
Or is it too many
To burden the digits to carry
The one was taken
The sum was effected
Redirected in blood

That thing behind out laughter
That heavy in our voice
Was a choice made long ago
To let go when necessary
All too scary
To hold onto
Anything but you
​
Children of The Complex
In this text
A testament
To how we resurrect
Love between the bars
Between the scars and their fading
I’ll give the stories to the stones
Let them weather
And chip away
Better them than my shoulders
New man be human
Hold rock in hand 
And break away like Flint
Turn these tainted waters
Into tools of liberation
Spread seeds across the nation
And water
Water
Water
The children 

It’s a different kinda flex
When we survive
We hold barbed wire
To the neck
Of the prison industrial complex