FOR LIFE / FOR MAISHA
(my advice to my niece)
i love
you & have
nothing but encouragement
for yr life in my missive to you,
yr life, not mine, what you see & be,
how you shape yr space & escape
from the restrictions earlier generations
have created, over their walls
into the wilderness yes, but free
free, & that's the real, to be free
to be everything or nothing like
what has been artifically erected
by those who want young people
to be old images, regurgitated thoughts,
& rather stupendously stupid
reincarnations of realities
this world would have been
oh so much better off without
such twisted combinations
you know
& i know you may not know
where you're going to
but you know
you're never going back to
those bruising and battering befores,
those false images of stability enforced by fists or
incapacitating inhibitions
& above all, never back to pick up on
all that emotional baggage
standing on every corner
of the small town called crescent city
it is so difficult to be young in this old world
so strange, so frustrating trying to find community
when every individual thinks
they are a king or a queen
or for sure that you should be their slave or knave
co-dependent or some other
reduction ad absurdum
there are firing squads outside,
paddy rollers in the woods
ghosts riders in the sky
& a million good reasons to stay
holed up inside, be careful but don't be afraid
even if you can't find the key to the combination
at least climb out the window and keep going
the only way to be really free is to never surrender
so that's it, this letter is to let you know
not everybody back here wants you back
as a little brown girl
reliving what never happened anyway
except as some male orchestrated fantasy
& i guess that is the essence
—since life is real and finite—
if you are going to be somebody's fantasy
you might as well live & be yr own dreams
regardless of the cost or
how you may loose yr way sometimes,
live & be, live yr dreams & be yrself
however difficult or confusing it may be to discover
yr life lived to the fullest is the best & only
value you can give to a world already overflowing
with frightened and repressed children dressed up
in adult years, live & be maisha, live & be
yrself
—kalamu ya salaam