“Black or AA”, “Stasis”

peggy owusu-ansah

Black or AA (African American)

Black or AA

I’ve struggled my whole life to know what to say

To my family I’m African, to society I’m black

To the cops I’m a menace, for employment there’s always something I lack

These days it seems like race is a race

Discrimination is hardest against which shade of face?

All Hispanics are Mexican, better keep them out and when they’re qualified for the jobs they hold we blame them for our economic drought

All Asians are Chinese, do you know what’s up with my phone? I’m sure you have experience from the place you should call home

You’re from the Middle East? Oh I gotta run, I don’t need your terrorist tendencies rubbing off on my son

And me, I’m black, are you from the ghetto? Tell me about the “black experience”, but I doubt they want to know how as I feel as though the government is my Gepetto

Struggling to break free of the puppeteer’s strings, to get from point A to point B this world makes me do crazy things

As I sit on this form where the government asks for my type they neglect to realize that it changes my life

When I claim race I am vilified, ethnicity I am ostracized, when nationality I am confronted by those before me who died

A control question they say, just to get a feel for our audience, yet once they learn of the control they seem to lose common sense

I become a threat, a weapon, something to be feared; from a child’s age to my dying years

The internal dilemma inside me builds the thoughts in my head continue to fill

I am who I say I am, not what they; yet the thoughts of they have more of a say

In my life, my success, my struggles, and my duress

I am sick of this psychological chess

But before I checkmate there is something I must say

If color and ethnicity are all the same, as I have been taught by my American pillaged education everyday, then what is white anyway?

Stasis

I keep finding myself stuck

Whether that’s in my thoughts or in my tracks I’m not sure

But as I keep going down this path

I’m not sure how much more I can endure

I’ve tried to pray it away or walk it away or talk about it until neither of us had anything left to say

but you don’t really know what you’re in until you’re out and once I tried to fill myself with material

things that only helped to further cripple my emotional drought

I keep finding myself stuck

With something far in front of me and trouble close behind

As I keep trying to hold on until I can have some peace of mind

As I worry that there may be nothing left of me to find

Or fear that this sensation is me defined

I keep finding myself stuck

Whether that’s in my bed or someone else’s I’m not sure

But between the sheets I can feel that there is more than pleasure I am trying to procure

I roll over as an act of resignation as if to say take my body for there is nothing else left as I watch

myself slip deeper until I have reached a place where I am completely bereft of color or sound or the

responsibilities to which I am bound and for one second I am free, but just as luck would go for me

I am revived by the sound of he

He who asks though I cannot give and confuses coercion as compliment

Who gives me promises with fingers crossed, of the elaborate ones I could document

Who I continue to entertain because as luck would have it, I don’t care much for myself either,

So as the match made in heaven slowly reaches armageddon I can barely catch myself in time for a breather

I keep finding myself stuck

Whether that’s on my issues or in my life I can’t tell

All I know is that I think for the time being I’m over saying I’m doing well

Or trying to imitate perfection mere seconds after hyperventilating as if I have cast as a spell

Or calling my family and only being able to tell them the things in which I excel

Or being in my room balled up in the corner where my thoughts are the only things on which I can dwell

Or laying down to rest my head and as I inhale my dreams and my tears are the only thing I can smell

Or turning on and off my life as if I can willfully dissociate at the sound of a bell

Or silently nodding along while being degraded as I continue to choke down my yells

But there’s a way that others can see so clearly that I can see if I squint but just nearly

Because as I’m suffocated by the physical and emotional stops rendered by my mind

My greatest fear is that what you see today is all that there is left to find

Nothing left to see, no more to achieve

No way to move forward, nothing else to believe

I have nowhere else to go, no one left to love

Only the hope that in my next life I can reincarnated as a dove

Flying free and soaring above all

Receiving love without withdrawal

Finding joy in things deemed small

I keep finding myself stuck

Whether that’s in a routine or an act, I can’t say

Neither can I decipher if I’ve always been this way

Or if this feeling is here to stay