Boom... Bang.
There he lays… There she stays all alone and cold.
She’s bad… He’s in a gang.
Where all the good things?
Cause all I hear is the bad’s that have been told.
Cuz all I hear is the wrong, slavery in my family they were sold,
But we’re just learning about the past, not doing anything to change it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s permanent so we can’t rearrange it,
But why are we just learning about it, instead of learning from it.
We try to make a slight change, but then give up and it plummets.
I know I’m young, so I don’t know much about life,
But I feel like the way the world is it’s not going right.
Yeah, it’s a “New Year. New Me.” kinda feeling,
But in this way of life, I don’t know how we’re dealing.
With being in a world where so much is revealing,
So many are hurt, but yet there is nobody healing.
There was judging back in the day, I know, I shouldn't I say “back in the day” but I have to say that I was taught this way.
To look not only in your future but look back in the past,
But focus on your culture because you're black and you’re “Free at last”

The future of the world is in our hands
Of this country that we stand

The future of our lives is in our hands
Of the peace that we please for demand

The future of the world is in our hands
From now on I have a plan

To be one in the eyes of the sun
To sing songs with the ones who are long gone
To play a game of life or death
To want more then what we guess

The future of this land is in our hands
Of all people to expand
We need to unite

To hold hands with no fright
With no harm in our words
With no tear in our soul or our eyes
We must keep our eyes on the prize
To love and need the grown ones to see
We aren't that bad after all

The future is in our hands
Of course we know this
Yes we noticed

That it is time for a change
Time for a place
Time for a chance to stand tall as one
As a whole on this earth

The future is in our hands
From now on I have a plan
To be ******* my soul
Live long and live whole
Be full of trust and full of lust
Never to forsake the ones we love

The future is in our hands
And yes I still have a plan
Be fruitful but not by popular demand
Be strong and powerful in the face of our rivals
As they try and take our rifleish voice
Our army stands tall
We crawl high up the wall
We longingly live to govern these people
The ones dumb enough to give
Dumb enough to not be able to see that the new generation has me

I hate you, parents
Yall hurt us the most when yall post to protect us
"Fight for your children!" Naw it's easier to neglect us
Tell grandma don't be afraid of me
Because my generation is reckless
We're labeled naive, wild and disrespectful
But to receive it you must first respect us
Mothers wonder why you bury strangers wearing daddy's necklace                      
Who thought it was good for them to want power and wealth?
Welp, you raised them like that now bury them by yourself
I was conceived to a house they already knew was broken and torn
They let me believe when I die
I'm going down in flames just to burn
I got health and mental problems  
I didn't ask to be this way
But guess I'm forced to live and learn.
For a beautiful death, that's all I pray

Her face, flawless and filtered, flows over
my chest, ribs, stomach, hips, fitting the curved
mounds of my body, and even within simplicity
of thread and dye, I sense her presence as her face
hangs from my frame, a statement louder than pillow-lips,
Nancy Sinatra-hair and a glamorous 60’s ***** face.

When paired with leggings and an artfully-distressed denim jacket,
I become a member of the “freshman generation of degenerate
beauty queens,” a hipster fallen to the circumstance of youth,
but I wear her face and the romance of it all reminds me:
we are not defined as Lolitas lost in the hood, or distant,
airy voices in a sea of crude jokes and half-baked skits

meant to highlight shortcomings of a person who doesn’t give
two *****. Lana fits me better than my ribbed, red
sweater and even amidst gods and monsters,
this T-shirt makes pretty last, and I am just as cool.

Please allow for me to say
What I believe needs to be said.
Step aside for one minute
And let me through.

I have words flying through my mind
And dreams aching out of my soul.
I have something to give to this world
If only someone will listen.

Do not let your prejudice
Decide for you,
Rethink your unimagined views
And allow me to come through.

For I am here
And I am now.
I am your future
And I am your present
And I am your only option.
So raise me right
And guide me on
But do not try to influence me
With aged rituals
And tired ideas.

Allow me to speak
Allow me to tell you my ideas
Allow me to take your place
Because your time
Is up.

I can only write on the computer.
And I suppose that that’s not really the right thing to say, because people are going to say that I really am part of the next generation who survives solely by technology.

I really do try to write on paper, but I can only use pen because pencil smudges too easily and the end gets so dull,
So when people say that they can’t send me a link to one of their favorite poems because it’s on paper, my respect for them goes up by about sixty percent.

The part of writing on paper that scares me the most,
the part of speaking in real life that scares me the most

is that I can’t delete words.

On Microsoft Word, I can go back and add words into the middle of my poem, I can look at it as a whole and as a half and everywhere in between,

I can delete half of it and forget about, and that half will be lost forever.

But the way my fingers sometimes stick to the keyboard reminds me, I think, that the words that I’ve deleted stick with me forever, no matter how lost they are.

They’re not in some vast, infinite vacuum of the internet-

but stuck to my fingers because that was the only physical presence of those words at the time they were given life.

(Baby ducks follow the first moving thing they see when they hatch,)

And it’s some weird, modern folk tale, how the words got life, and how the words died.

So maybe if I’m the only one who can’t write on paper, then this word carrying curse is the punishment?

It’s a special flaw that makes the protagonist unique but relatable, (along with making her not able to spell anything and not able to talk to people)

And if poetry is just rambling and writing is ranting, then what are words.

The cancerous cells in a slice of bone marrow?

More likely some hellish creature that comes out of everyone only at two in the morning,

or the sticky stuff that I feel sometimes on my keyboard (or is it my fingers?)

Because my sticky fingers are a word’s physical form,

and if you think about it, you really can’t ever touch a word. They’re either soundwaves or dried ink on a dead tree, or pixels on a screen.

(or on your fingertips or your tongue.)

And I carry them with me everywhere, on my tongue and on my sticky fingers.