The Love Blog - Nappy Boy Love – The Rise and fall of gendered Emotion. PT 1 of 5

Love.

What's being opted out is the rough stuff of delivery, and not the ethical circumstance, because we are well and truly into the lofty resounding sheet of divine love.

Thus, this is not about a sexual revolution happening, been happening for the last fifteen years of my life, it's not about some of it I can do, some of it I can't, or the unwillingness to embrace the likelihood of a hernia when trying to match the enthusiasm of a karma sutra wanna be, this is not consummate mother-whore preferences’, tap that ass', or adhering to staying within my own freaky limitations, at least not yet.

Unequivocally, this is the school entitled ol', such is the natural instinct of a black man in a "black" state of mind, it is compelled to achieve one's identity by the rigours of a time, serving to to whet the notorious cultural taste for the sensational and to reinforce all that we now find it necessary to believe. This is the loss of virginity to the sounds of Freddie Jackson's Rock Me Tonight at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, this is nineteen years old, stood on Ladbroke Grove's Tabernacle stage, resonating the notion of love, and lack thereof, this is Lovers Rock biggest fan, this is Ebony female resplendence and what it means to nappy boyhood implications, this is love, and how it took forty-two years to come to really know of it.

The idea of love, more so love's occurrence was the premonition of life without love, a proposition rooted in a cultural compliance to do without love; the soppy alternative, a weak and floored emotional model to live by, in many respects another loveless child expected to navigate the trappings of life without the aid of love, like a beacon, guiding the soul in a right direction. Growing up, fatherless children appeared to be the gatekeepers of life without love, in search of love, they were the ones who were just another, they were the ones who's example was the defunct emotional tenure of their childhood, they were the ones taught never to express the idealisation of love, the ones who their Mother's taught to never love anything but her, the ones who were taught that they were the consequence of their fathers choices; the ones taught to never love themselves; the black, the benighted, consumed with confliction in the hope that with love he can live fully and deeply as a man was meant to live.

Cometh the myriad of emotions, and what to do with it, this particular child's tale started his own love revolution, in essence the forcible overthrow of a cultural order, in favour of a new system, a coup that started with plastering the bedroom wall with pictures of ebony Queen’s, from mummy's discarded Ebony magazines, their imagery, their beauty, their tenderness the closet attainable thing. For this particular child, surely such beautiful black matriarch spawned by the influence of love, love which existed because Mummy's soul songs sung of love, and none more so than Anita Baker, none till this day more affirmatively than the beautiful Phylicia Rashād - "The Mother" of the black community - graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, so fine and so very definitive, part embodiment of love, part baptism, had me singing Marvin Gaye “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, but it’s back to you because it seems like I don’t know anybody like “you”, when close to the absence of love there were times that I hated you, pictures on the wall literally taking sensibility on a spiritual exploration.

Often debating “you”, ashamed of me because there was no matriarchal her, it was this this kind of love; allowing the words of colour-struck niggas to hit me and turn you away, this kind of love, “spit” mediocrity; the beautiful mess of singularities and complexities that we are, even with this childlike interlude of self and reflection, it was this kind of love that struck me as how blended are self and love; to mix smoothly and inseparably together, and how indicative of each other should they be.

This kind of love; my first ever poem, encompassing the myriad of hard-wearing and affirmative emotive and perceptual statuses, from the most transcendent virtue and blameless custom, to the intimate interpersonal regard and to the meekest desire, the school; entitled ol’, the imagism, in the style of symbolist poetry, it’s this love that rooted the layers of love misunderstood, part 2 of the love blog endeavouring to elucidate what these roots grew into.