Pick up a Pen

“This is amazing writing, it just doesn’t feel like me. I shouldn’t be this confident in telling lies.”

I’ve stumbled through writing poetry. I take advantage of any moment to come up for air when too immersed in anything. Writing poems is how I breathe after swimming through the waters of prose and academic literature. Words normally fall out of me with ease, and lay neatly onto paper when I’m not forced to handle them with metaphors or vivid imagery. 

The only thing beautiful about the prose stories is honesty. Truth strips a tale of anything we believe we must dress it with to make it worth reading. Prose allows me the freedom to speak and not perform, and any added lyrical elements help make it good writing. But I’ve been accused of being a poet. And in my poetry, I’ve been accused of being a rapper.

My writing is inspired by the rhythm and lyricism of the black written and oratorical traditions. The closer my pen gets to poetry, the closer I feel to the warmth of my heart. The closer I feel to just being, lyrical. I enjoy words, and the access writing gives me to twisting and wielding them in any way my imagination aspires. Writing is how I grab hold of God, and people.

Writing helps me seize life and time, no matter how fast they’re moving or how patient they seem to be with their processes. When I turn a story or moment into writing, I’ve bent them to my will. Writing is one of the few places where I can alter events, people, and myself. Writing is where I imagine people listening to what I have to say.

What look like words to some, are bricks to build a house for me. Poetry is just world building. The stories I’m too timid to be honest about, I can hide behind a wall of cryptic language and force readers to work to find the truth. To read the story, you have to become it, from the symbols to spaces. Truth is meant to be taken on, not merely taken in. That’s all storytelling is– truth telling and the confessions of my flesh. The confessions of wounds begging to be seen because exposure is the only way for them to scab. And poetry is how I safely tell stories that I know might fuck everything up, whether mine or someone else’s. Writing poems is how I cheat the truth-telling game.

But I also realize how demanding writing a poem is, or maybe my standard for good writing is being exposed. Maybe a deep-rooted ambition to be both minimal and lyrical is being stretched. From rhythm, to flow, to honesty and delivery, poetry pulls another dimension of my artistry from the shadows. An element that writing helped me suppress at an early age, speaking. Poetry makes words walk and leap off paper. And when they take form through someone not familiar with the element of performance, my posture can either breathe life into them, or make them lay dead and done in, with no breath to live.

Gun Hands:

Whether it’s a pen or a piece, he hold death in his hands’

Black boy gotta walk with his hands in his pockets cause his hands look like guns

Same guns dat birthed da’ bullets they sent through Mike Brown, and hid in Emmett Till Lungs

Lungs strong enough to whistle yo favorite song and hold lead

Officer told me if I reach for anything then it better be for God, cause if it’s for yo waist, you might get put on some linen, or find out yo sister can sing

No sudden movements cause black boy armed and dangerous and black boy might get shot soon as his feet clap da’ earth

And he black and ran track so a bullet might send him and his feet back to da soil, back to da dirt, to da beginning, to Genesis

Feet more swift than niggas who run a 4’4 flat wit lungs full of weed smoke

Black boy thorough and done knew how to handle a strap since birth

Black baby got lynched cause a grown man was scared of his nerf, grown man couldn’t tell a toy from what he got strapped to his hip

Black boy can’t wear a hoodie and keep his hands tucked, cause if police stop him they just tell him to keep his hands up

Paranoia got my senses numb, cause a brotha walk up on me with his hands out, I still assume he got a gun

And da power of a bully wit a bullet is da same thing as what a coward do wit a trigger if u push em

To pull his gun, cause it’s either peace in his heart or a piece in his hand, so dats why u hold yo gun in front of u when u greet a man

Now when I see a black man I throw my arms up, cause his heart prolly boxing his chest if I keep my hands tucked

Black boy get anxiety around guns, whole world making laws about his hands

Niggas used to throw these, now they blow these

Now I’m killer-adjacent

And I walked with my hands in my pocket cause I’m scared to show I carry killers of a child’s innocence

I had to learn to load my gun with a pen

Curse we was born wit. In church aiming at God praying he take these weapons off my wrist

Told by: Kwon