ALETHEA JIMISON - POEMS

Alethea Jimison is a poet and author. Her work has been featured in Queer Voices, Adelaide Magazine, Literary Yard, and Poetry Nation.  Alethea loves writing stories that challenge the reader to make the world a better place through personal development and accountability.  You can find out more about Alethea’s work at www.aj-thewordsmith.com. 

​The Hammer of Racism

The hammer of life beats rapidly and fiercely piercing the mind with a savage penetration; creating festering wounds and perpetuating spiritual violation. 
Racism is an insidious illusion that hides in the open within our modern society.  Whitewashing and brainwashing happen daily on our TV. 
Some people don’t even know that they are the problem.  Brown and golden skin pitted against pale and yellow skin.  We’ve been conditioned to deny our own humanity within.
          We are all the echo of a limitless ancestry.  Most of our history has been suppressed and beaten into the shadows as our color was smothered in mass genocides. 
The historical obliteration of millions of colors of the rainbow has been denied. 
The school books lie to our children and tell us that some pale-face discovered America with impunity. Our government institutions close every year to honor his raping and destruction of a whole racial identity. 
          We have the power to create unity with unconditional love and denial of a specific racial identity. 
I am unspecified- I am the light. I come from a long line of Africans and Shamans of Turtle Island before They stole our history and renamed my home America. 
I am human...Hue-man… I am the light I see within you.  I am no longer the child who was never good enough because of a label that was never true. 
I release myself from the pain caused by the racism within my own roots.  Rejected by the unloving and unloved in their own bitter inner disputes.
Ignorance was the factory that produced the labor of judgment on a conveyor belt of automated conditioning.  We grew up to be beautiful against all mockery because all colors of the rainbow are Godly.
Today I am free but I remember the journey of the little mulatto who believed she was nobody.

​Ghetto Symphony

​The sound of sirens never ended. Instead of dancing to the melodies of beats and symphonies, we were ducking and rolling to the sound of bullets and the never-ending wails of ambulances mimicking the cries of the hopeless. 
 
We lived across the street from a liquor store and the illegal activity was so bad, we were one step away from having a door to door crack salesmen as a form of entrepreneurial representation of our economic depression.
 
Snap! The sound of bullets as usual even in the bright light of day.  We slam our bodies down to the pavement and try to shimmy-crawl away. 
 
Someone tried to rob the liquor store as usual. Crack money is always in demand.  He’s running from the bar-crossed doorway with something in clutched his hand.
 
Suddenly, a sound like firecrackers explodes from the store. He drops everything and the sight of blood bursting from his chest was like the finale of a fourth of July show.  The sound of children playing is abruptly silenced.  Just another terrifying day in the ghetto.
 
The sound of sirens never ended. Instead of dancing to the melodies of beats and symphonies, we were ducking and rolling to the sound of bullets and the never-ending wails of ambulances mimicking the cries of the hopeless.

​Free from the Ghetto

​God, I have to get out of the ghetto! I need to be free.  I don’t want to perpetuate the endless cycle of my family’s poverty. 
My teacher told me that poverty is an inherited part of most people’s destiny. I will not accept that!  I will not live in fear of the boogeyman coming to shut off the water and electricity. 
I will be able to pay my bills.  I’m not going to make the same mistake that my mother made by letting some man come along and tell me he loves me so that he can walk away and leave me filled with his seed.
 
Six kids, no job, no man and no hope.  Guess that’s why some women choose to sling that dope. 
Sell that tail because we’re taught that the only asset we have as women in the ghetto is a low-cut shirt, tight pants and a good flirt.
These grown women telling us teenagers that we need to find a good enough man to pay our bills and take care of us. I can’t accept that. I’m man enough to take care of myself.
OK breathe, I can do this.  I’m going to have to talk like a white person so that I can get a good job. Wait- that’s stupid.  Being proper is not a white thing. What am I saying?
Articulate, crisp, concise language management makes me sound more intelligent. 
“Were you in the boat when the boat tipped over? No silly I was in the water.”  Pish posh proper talk.  That’s what I have to train myself to do.
No mo’e saying go’n to the sto’e- I mean- “Say, I am going to the store.” My jaw aches from all of this over-modulating. I keep going- this is Olympic style training.
Shoulders back! Chin up!  Momma helped me put the book on my head so that I could learn how to glide like a queen.  She was proud of me for trying to be free. She promised me that I can be anything I want to be.
Every day, I read the pages of the dictionary and begged for the Encyclopedia Britannica for my birthday so that I could teach myself about a world outside of slang and gangs.
I wrote new words that I never heard of on small index cards and posted them on the refrigerator as my word of the day.   The gap between me and the ghetto grew wider as I heard my sister’s friends mutter to her “what the heck did she just say?”

​Racial Obscurity

​Biracial ambiguity.  I descended into the shadows of racial obscurity in California where all brown skin is called Mexican and yellow bloods were too yellow to be called sista.  I was never white enough to be a white girl- no, I was the wanna-be-white-girl with no identity. 
The discrimination came from both directions. I was never black enough to “understand the struggle of racism” according to my own people. 
I was yellow blood, an outcast with my crisp articulation of self-obtained education. 
I started hanging out with Maria with her flashy Latina eyes. She took me home to her family and they scoffed at the “Mexican” who didn’t know her own legacy.  “¿Por qué no hablas español?” I was asked scornfully. 
What did I do? Since I was never black enough to “Represent” and I was not white enough to be legit, I learned Spanish and blended in with the other brown skins. 
No one represented my biracial ancestry. I hear, black power, white power… I never heard anyone say biracial power! 
I became wrathful of the need to identify as anything.  I was defensive from being discriminated against by people who were my family. 
I’m not black.  I’m not white.  I’m tired of these labels that are used to create separation through false representations of a fictional identity. 
The lack of biracial representation in our society is a blatant form of racial obscurity. 
You won’t hear me complaining about how unfair the world is. I’m aware of the shortcomings of our broken community.  People are too busy grasping for labels and marketed identities that they bear limited perception and become unaware of their opportunities.
 

​Burning Phoenix of Metamorphosis

​I rose from the burning ashes of the toxic concrete streets of the ghetto with the music of sirens wailing in the night.
I am the burning phoenix of metamorphosis; the evolution of my own excuses and a representation of the promises I made to myself that no matter what I fear, I can and will excel.
I cannot and will not be contained by the colonized blocks of repetition and endless cycle of war and poverty that plagues my ancestry. I release myself from the bitterness of our bloody history.
My heartbeat is as fierce as thunder and there is a fire in my veins.  I will not temper my light.  I was meant to spread the passion of my conviction through flames.  I will burn the house down of my programming that came from lies.
I am the burning phoenix of metamorphosis; the evolution of my own excuses and a representation of the promises I made to myself; no matter what I fear- I can and will excel.