"when i grow up"

17 april 2009

1951 (7:51p)

 

this is the spoken word peice that i heard last night during the "explorer's got talent" show. it's by sekou the misfit & entitled, "when i grow up." there is a youtube video for those who are interested, check it out :)

 

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Ask me now. 

Ask me now, mommy. 

Am I too late? 

Ask me now, what I wanna do. 

Ask me now, what I wanna do when I grow up. 

Am I too late? 

Cuz I think I finally figured it out. 

I don’t wanna do for a living. 

I wanna be for a living.

 I wanna be life.  I wanna make things grow and move and breathe and reproduce and respond, I wanna make things respond and react and rejoice and relax and relate and release and receive and reform as soon as I recite. 

When I grow up, I don’t wanna be like those other kids, mommy, that wanna be ballers and doctors and astronauts, I wanna be passion and heat and energy when I grow up. 

I don’t wanna be the fireman, mommy, I wanna be, the fire. 

I wanna be the explosion behind the soul’s big bang theory that leaves in its place desire. 

I wanna be that burning within that gives life to the word aspire. 

Let me, warm the cold souls of the despairing and heartless, let me, light the paths of those wandering in darkness, let me, fill the most primitive with wonder, and provide children with their first definition of “HOT”, and when the artists of the world have become so infatuated with ice that the whole world freezes over, let me be the poet that melts the icecaps, drowns the planets, and starts things over again two mc’s at a time like noah. 

When I grow up, I don’t wanna be the astronaut mommy, I wanna be the space that he explores. 

I don’t wanna be the doctor, mommy, I wanna be the cure. 

 I wanna be the prescription for a better life, the way through which the sick and the shut-in can find hope, health, happiness, and healing; I wanna be the pill of which they take two, and the call that is placed the next morning, I wanna be the white blood cells that strengthen the immune system, the clot that stops the bleeding, the antidote that counters the poison, I wanna speak antibiotic poetry that defeats your life’s viruses but ONLY if you take my words in three times a day until the entire bottle is gone. 

I wanna be the shot that you are scared to receive but makes you feel so much better when I am inside you, I wanna be the therapy that you hate going to but you know you cannot be better without. 

I wanna be the perspective of the world through the eyes of a child, an autistic child who is diagnosed with a sickness when in fact she merely sees the world with a clarity that the rest of us can only dream of having. 

When I grow up, I don’t wanna be the preacher, mommy, I wanna be the word. 

I don’t wanna be an artist, mommy, I wanna be the art.  not the painter, let me be the canvas. 

Not the choreographer, let me be the dances, not the poet, let me be the stanzas, I don’t wanna be the singer mommy, I want to, be the sound!

The song you sing the way you sing it when you think ain’t nobody else around.

When I grow up I don’t wanna be the lawyer mommy, I wanna be the justice. 

I don’t wanna the philosopher daddy, I wanna be the philosophy that the brilliant minds try to follow or the brilliance in that mind, or rather let me be the elusive concepts that they cant quite figure out like hope, purpose, faith, and time, I wanna be, time! 

So that the world will go to sleep every day feeling like they never have enough of me, and will panic when they feel me slipping away and so that when I am up, people will stress out, when they feel that they are running out of me, let me be time so that I will never again feel this depression I feel now for being abandoned by it, let me be time so that I will never miss myself, so that I will never be before myself, never be, out of myself, never be too late never be too early so that for once in this life of unfulfilled dreams that have left my cheeks streaked with saltwater erosion and my mouth perpetually coated with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment, for once I can be right on me. 

When I grow up, I wanna be the antithesis of without,

the contradiction of silence,

the inverse of absence,

the reverse of regression,

the paradox to mortality,

the antilogy to emptiness the illumination of shadows,

the antonym of void,

the opposite of darkness,

I wanna be the opposite of darkness,

let me be the opposite of darkness,

so that when the greatest poet in existence recites the first line of the greatest poem ever written,

let there be light,

I can begin.