For my Peoples!

For my peoples, endeavouring to respire the breath of living and merely stay peaceable, for as long as memory can remember, on behalf of everybody that life as ever known, devout inspiration has always been motivated by who will stand and represent the ‘people’, hang it all out, put whatever’s sacred on the line, and solely for the heavenly benefit of ‘my peoples’.

Reminiscence is under the impression, that since conception intuitions have been modified to fulfil the criteria of the nowadays, and histories nostalgic past of which have dictated the everyday, from the point of consciences outset, have moulded and cajoled and inscribed revolutionary dictums on the tip of every spoken tongue, hollering at future’s sight aspiring for great, and of all the stories of ‘struggle’ thy peoples use to recite, with vigour, with ache, with love of the both, initiated into the bafflingly beautiful world; of which consisted of all-black-everything, consequently this particular story always wanted life to read like a favourite poem. And with a Big Daddy Kane swagger, and Bob Marley sympathies and The Harder They Come proclamations, and those profound Marcus Garvey intimations rummaging soul just to hit the spot, fundamentally an intense eclectic mix of aspirations were inspired by an incessant pain, and at all times love of a spiritual kind rendering the lifelong reciprocation sincere, essentially everything every exhale has ever known, and though love for all things thee was never in doubt, since conception, profoundly this particular child has unremittingly suffered a persevering pain, endlessly, nonstop sensed upset, down to the nappy root permanently in love with the struggle when the labour of the strain represented thyself, and my peoples, where their life is not lived, but merely spent subsisting, just about managing to survive, barely keeping head above water, and God damn; just solely making ends meet.

Come a long way since milk at break times and in-line awaited the BCG jab, well aquatinted now of the hypocrisy in the purported values of Western culture – from its Judeo-Christian religious traditions to its political and economic institutions – and it’s inherently racist arrangements, a long way since Greensleeves gyrated Sunday’s to the sound of walk like warriors, and Channel 4’s ‘No Problem’ caught the suggestible imagination, from when ‘Fuck the Police’ was revolutionary’, and idle time was spent rolling roaches so the Brotha’s can smoke, to a worldview of which encompassed inspired aspirations courtesy of the success of the Haitian Revolution, and Revolutionaries assassinations, and Black Skin, White Masks - an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the African psyche - of which permeated the soul of whom who read it, not never forgetting the origins of Black and African indigenous nationalism in political thought - big-up Marcus Garvey and Benjamin "Pap" Singleton - through to pre-Classical Black nationalism, the Revolutionary War, and the psychology of kith and kin confrontation, thus still rocking the soul of the black nationalism of the 1990s, still wanting to get carried away with a movement that challenges bourgeois blacks for the minds and souls of ‘the people’, to be proud of their race and to see beauty in their own kind, still the temperament is as angry as ever, still in as much pain, and after a Father’s lineage really is a Son’s trail, only thing changed is the realisation that thy is supposed to grow old with somebody, not because of something.

Malcolm X quipped, "While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare," a statement to be applauded, or scorned, either way the celebration of the struggle is not a merriment when the movement hasn’t provoked ‘let’s keep on’, or at the very least not in the direction that moves away from many tongues yapping the eternity of the same struggle, alike many a’ generations before, and after, things that need to be said, still, even now still talking revolution sounds when God was never with that, never was with surviving to fight a struggle just to glimpse one moment of what’s it’s like to live, consequently, unable to undo the done, faced with the only option of what to do now, it’s clear of the need to stop singing the slogan attributed to my peoples, and only because my peoples need not hear the song anymore, not when they are alright, when Sistas and Brothas be cool now, their days are spent inhaling the breath of resurrection, maybe even return to where the soul begun, only because before last breath lets go of the final exhale, for my peoples would dearly love to know what it’s like to live with my peoples, and as free as the spirits of those who have left.