The Anthem
10•11•01
We come with our tattoos an our piercings, with our slick tricks and street wise dome
We come with our laziness and our arts and our voices
With our sagging pants and oversized shirts, with our bald heads and dread heads,
And fades and Ceasers , braids and weaves and afros, goatees and afro-puffs.
With our twisted, sexist double standards, and our half-naked music videos.
With our sellouts, and chieftans, and leaders and bitches and hoe callers and feeble-mindedness; with our follower attitudes and clone dressing and name brand whoring and rebelliousness; with our electronic fever for ever smaller gadgets and doo-dads to replace the newest ones we just replaced six months ago.
We come with our designer drugs and ravers and hip hop heads, and techno and house, jungle and Dancehall and trance. We come with our prejudices and denyal and biases. With our homophobia and xenophobia and arachnophobias, with our fears and paranoia
With conspiracy theories that are only half theory.
We come from happy homes and broken homes and foster homes
Dysfunctional families and adoption agencies, divorce courts and step-parents.
We come from ghettoes and street corners and bodega buildings and weed spots, crackhouses and brownstones, two bedroom apartments and shanty towns, brick walls and cement blocks, high rises and guttah places.
We come from beneath bridges and staircases and asylum rooms; from behind gigantic slabs of ignorance boulders and from between the cracks of the American Dream suites.
We come from suburbs and trash and trailer parks, from Georgia and East New York, and New Dheli and fucking Pakistan. We are the youth and the new, and the revival of the old. We are bell bottoms and haltertops and hoodies, cornbread muffins and cantelope on fingers; We are sex in the grass and on the beach and lying on rooftops. We are free concerts in the park and drumming circles after poetry readings. We are house parties, and wood floors and trees and cheap biscuits that come in rolls of dough and funk and soul and spirit. We are the bridges and the shores and the dockyards; the warehouses and alleyways, the subway tunnels and the underground clubs and little juice cafes, headwraps and walkmen and platinum covered earlobes, gold fronts and engagement rings; ridiculously expensive cars with no rent money; we are dot coms, and self-employed money makers ,
Girl hounders, scattered sexual preferences and non-hidden porno collections; we are skyscrapers built around cathedrals, caves in the middle of projects. We are the visions of teenage girls draped over balconies and watching the fireworks every fourth of July. We are the fantasies of little boys with really … pretty .. babysitters. We are martyr makers and life livers; we are circles come round again. We are the bugle horn before change,
the babies of peace and contradiction.
We come within your televisions and your camera shots; we peek from behind the billboard messages; We’re bombed across vacant building facades. We’re screaming from behind guitar riffs and the wrenching of soul strings; We’re crying out for love and attention and recognition, from frustration and fear, anger and impotence, happiness and hope.
We are Catholic and Pagan and Buddhist; Taoist and Tai Ch’I, Hindu and ghettoe and game. We are the lost and forlorn and forgotten;
the profound and the unforgettable.
We are hateful and loving and needy and arrogant and selfish and ill-mannered.
We are intelligence
We are brilliant
We are your future
We are the statue of liberty with a crown and a bottle of spraypaint
We are a fleshed out trinity of a black father a white mother, a mixed child, an indian-asian Holy ghost, and a universal church called the planet.
We are the bringers of change
And I
Am a spokesperson, a mouthpiece, a representative
Of this nation
AMEN