Passion Play

My heart feel like it’s gon’ beat out my chest, folk…

…Truth is, I’m writing this because I should be writing something about hope, about love, about growth.

Or maybe I should be writing a manifesto that busts in the heads of the powers-that-be; more specifically, simply demanding respect.

It’s just that, it’s not my style to vent. I want to invent … I think that’s why I initially signed on with the engineering thing … just the whole concept of creation … making things that will make the world better not just for myself, but for folks that are here now and are to come.

I just realized I can do that with a pen in my hand.

And in an idealistic world, the story would end there … I would weave wondrous works of waxed poetic, seeping soulfully in your streams of being, and so on, Selah, ha ha…

That’s not how it is though … and as much as I would much rather be a lover, folks insist on me putting on my gloves and being the proletariat…

Ahem, the Boxer … “I will do better”, eh?

That’s the whole hook; long before folks were paying me to write, I was writing for the love … wait a minute, that’s how this whole thing got started…

All that writing for pay ever got me was…

I told my editor that my heart was beating kind of funny one night … he looked at me kind of funny, then sternly told me to leave and go to the hospital, if that’s what I needed to do… so I call my pops, and he’s almost at the hospital before I am … I figured I would check things out, just to make sure … long story short, ain’t nothing wrong but my diet and how I allow things to roll at work, folk…

Putting your all in something and not getting the return you desired has been recently defined to me through the pain of an unreturned compliment…

I just have to put this in perspective, though. I don’t play empty compliments; shoot, I pay attention to details, so when I speak positively on something, it carries a lot of weight leaving the voice box.

It’s just … maybe the person doesn’t understand how much energy it took to make the compliment. Or maybe someone misunderstands the compliment. Or maybe … shoot, they just don’t care…

Eh. Nothing a tall glass of water can’t fix … not only the matters of the heart … but … shoot, ya’ll already know about the flow …

And that’s why I gotta flex on these fools … it’s not that they’re stepping on my Nikes … I can get another pair, but they stompin’ on my toes right now, and that aforementioned flow dictates that I express myself … don’t have to be rude to be righteous …

Besides, a leaky faucet is broken … and a leaky faucet is something like Chinese Water Torture…

But I digress. Real talk, I can see why cats up here crankin’ that Soulja Boy … I mean, that’s the easy way out … just drown your sorrows in that YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUU, ha ha…

I can even see why cats up here crankin’ that Suicide … I mean, how do you folks without some sense of a higher power cope when stuff just falls apart? A few pills here, a few wrists slits there … just drown your sorrows in that Cool.

From here, I can even see what happened to my man Ralph Wiley. He just gave of himself to so many people, just straight gave knowledge, energy, power, life … to people that didn’t much appreciate it until he had … you guess it, a heart attack.

But you know what? Shoot, I ain’t tryna die, folk. I’m tryna live…