Have no Path

The nights.

I'm passing through this life. Listening to rap music, and I'm growing tired of it to some extent. I love it because of it's poetic punch. It is filled with poetry, and heart, and soul, but it's topics are limited. Jay Z only talks about his money and things that money can buy. I can't relate to Mr. Z because I have neither. I can tell you what the lack of money will buy...nothing.

Nas is pure thug. Gun toting, gang related violence, throwing bullets around like blowing kisses. He is just one pit bull from the projects. I wonder, because I lived all of my life in the projects, and with weak minded people who can't separate Nas' fantasy from reality. You don't shoot at cops and live to make rap records. That's just the way life is. Cops will kill you if you fire on them. Simple young people. Keep the guns out of the ghetto. There is enough Black on Black crime without adding to it by bustin' caps because someone slept with your Hoe, or dissed you.

Common is a chameleon of sorts. His rapping seems highbrow, jazz-like, with a great deal of feel and rhyming ability. His words are quite poetic, and a challenge even for me to follow. But he too jumps from social consciousness to misogynist rhetoric. Sometimes I don't know when he's kidding about bitches and when he's really seriously quantifying women as Hoes. I can't seem to begin to understand him.

Notorious BIG is just notorious. He seems to be someone with limited thinking capacity, but boundless poetic ability. He sketches out his shortsighted life in crime and glorifies it and his wrong headed decisions. His beats are infectious, his words, hypnotic, the man had talent, much like 2Pac who also had exemplary talent, and his raps...or poems, were socially conscious. An extreme dichotomy from BIG, 2Pac seems to be a much redeeming voice in the raps scene.

But rap is poetry. You can't hide from it, you can't disguise it. I was one that avoided rap because of it's senseless content, but I have grown older, and less and less gullible...I suspect. I hate it when young men come to a poetry reading and start with the rap tempo, instead of just reading their work, it has to come out with a beat. Lyrical, rhythmic and powerful, and yet, it has to have that ridiculous tempo. I swear, they make me want to mount the stage and crack one or two of them across the jaw.

Still, is that envy? I've gone through my rap odyssey only to come out the other side...feeling inadequate. Rappers are rapping. They are being prolific. And I have struck a snag. I have halted in the mud. There is no motion in my writing, no progress. I feel no heat anymore, no reason to write poetry. I am in the doldrums like my brother once told me about that affected him. I am impotent, coming up with nothing. I think I have been preoccupied with my new life...but this mind freeze has been going on too long.

Longer than dealing with WE CARE and it's silliness. I'm feeling much the fraud lately. My life is changing. I can feel it. I have reached out for the life again, leaving the Beat Poet existence a bit at a time. Like the slow metamorphosis of a worm into a butterfly. I am slowly changing and there are growing pains in the transition. I am dealing with this new life the best way I know...but what about my poetic life? The life that got me through the hard times, the times that mattered?

I am thinking of what others write. I listen to other writers who come to the SHOUT OUT. Many of them are so talented that they come up with new ideas, new things. I have nothing new to write about. I'm writing what everyone else is. There is nothing new in the world that hasn't been written about in poetry.

Maybe that's why rappers are so limited. They know that there is so little to write about, so they hug their favorite chestnut like it was their mother's tit and stick with it. I can't be a rapper, I can't write like them. I can't follow in the footsteps of more talented poets. I was going to read through the poetry of other poets but what does that buy me? Do I become an even bigger imitator. My work is already so Bukowski-ish and I love that. It's not style that I want to find guidance in. I already have a style.

It's content. It's WHAT I write about that I want to learn. I want to pull out of these written works, ideas of what to write, that isn't about what everyone else is writing about. Sadly, at the time, it was homelessness. But I'm not homeless anymore. So has that bubble burst on me? I'm not being productive. This much I know. I want my muse. I want my muse to lead the way for me. She is my heart and my love. She is a guiding light. When I think of her, my pen moves, but it only writes the same thing. I want her to move my heart to something else. I want her to jump me from a longing heart to something else. I want her to open my eyes and see something else.

My confidence is not shaken.

I'll find my path. This is certain. I am not alone.

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