ThePoetWhoKnowsIt

-poems might be good, could all be crap but always necessary

[elmergrowspoetry]

I've fought to stay real by the river

Not be forgotten as a was

Washed down wishing wells

Dreams never resurfacing as anything more than Smooth stones

Sewn together to make a necklace to keep me grounded

Tethered to reality

Holding on to learning to let go

And how that process is the sweet filling I brought to snack on next to the waters that keep me held together

Flushing me with contempt for anything less than peace

I've fought for peace by the river

Found no daisies at the tips of hot rifles

They'd shot them all at the ones trying to drink

Threw the bodies down the current

Held a party by the pier

Said something that made me laugh or gag about about freedom

[elmergrowspoetry]

I know what fate feels like

That there is always something after something else

That time weaves threads through choices

That memory of old times isn't the only choice I have left

And that memory is never as good as when you live it

That living for new memory is the only constant present

And presently

I GOT TIME

Found it tucked in a box under my bed, in the basement, in the attic , where the shoes abuela bought me once stayed at

Where we keep our most valuables

Yu-gi-oh cards, charms and collectibles

Corner bit off by moving to college

When I'm alone I remind the box College took a bite out of me too

Got time caught between my middle toes and that shit hurt!

Brought back every demon I ever thought laid dormant

Faced them in my own time

Found time to sit and listen to their experiences

Validate

Appreciate

Made time to learn how to make time

I got time stuck behind my shoulder blade.

Tried to free it out with a muscle roller

Only relaxed for as long as time allowed

Knew time was inevitable

That I'd have to bow

[elmergrowspoetry]

I'm 27 now and still learning how not to be cheap with my words.

27 years have taught me we only get so many-

And that the words we spend, like time, are a non-refundable commodity.

27 years taught me to spend time wisely and vigorously- because life can be as exciting as you allow it to be-

and

People are only as kind as you allow them to be- so be kind first.

27 years have given me time to collect myself and time to panic.

Time to learn to allow myself these experiences without judging myself for experiencing them in the first place.

I learned that experience is just a word we use to describe when loss makes us stronger.

And that there's no better mentor than failure.

I've found- in 27 years- that most folks are trying their best at whatever it is they're doing. I've also found that my best and thier best has nothing to do with each other. What's more, being "the best" at anything is only as useful as your commitment to supporting people around you with your gifts.

I've been made to understand that every second is a gift -and second chances are parts of life that aren't guaranteed- after all nothing in life is. So cherish every chance to laugh with a friend.

I've had 27 years to find friendship in the funkiest places-Learned that the funky friends are the ones that fill my cup - I think I'll have to keep them for the next 27

I learned how young I am - that I love that for me- that I don't want to waste it.

That as long as I'm where the music is I won't.

I've learned about considering the fact that we're all connected- and that compassion is a testament to that collective connection.

In 27 years I've learned that the stories I tell myself about myself I most often believe. Learned to spin a narrative I loved until I received it.

I wish for 27 more years of learning to give forward everything I receive alongside every single one of you.

How lucky am I to be connected to so many wonderful people.

[elmergrowspoetry]

I am the decision my ancestors made to survive

[elmergrowspoetry]

James,

I'm trying again

To let the blood run cross dusty pages

Crusted over with short memory

James, I feel everything sometimes

My body vibrating on frequencies only dogs can hear

So I beg on all fours to let the words out

Forgetting mental drought

- resting again on meditations carved out of learning to be alone

Finding the voice in the darkness and realizing it's mine

-And that being alone is also mine

James...

I'm alone with the anxiety of wanting the work to devour me

Till something inspires me

And I don't know how to tell the rest of them but to show it

James,

Was passion what chased us from that continent

Is it also what kept us warm ?

Was there always bound to be love in the western night followed by transatlantic terrors our lovers shake us out of passionately

James,

I've found blackness in the parts of my skin that burned themselves touching hot parts of the stove just trying to fix a meal

Embraced it when I let that which destroyed

Nourish

Because James,

I've learned that nourishment sometimes sounds like,

No

And

Ouch

And

fffuck-

- Tastes sweet and spicy going down

Cuts through the pain all the same

James-

Does understanding always come with sacrifice

I don't know how much spiritual currency I can afford to dole out anymore

Are there scales in heaven tracking my worth

And do they have any idea that I feel like my spirit is vibrating with the will of everything I have ever sacrificed just to survive

Do they know that I feel like I have beome my sacrifice

James

When you gave your life to the movement

And it died along with your friends

I hope you didn't feel anxiety-

You sacrificed too much for that

-

Another letter to James Baldwin

-Elmer Martinez 7/21/23 2:19am

[elmergrowspoetry]

I've got words caught in the back of my throat like a bad cough

Words I forgot I knew

Got words I ain't slurred in years

Poems spitting back all the times I spat lyrical

Waxed poetical

Words I wish I'd said

I got words yall

Words that start with L

Like

Lowell

Lover

Learned

Lessons

Leaving

Lowell

Words I found in Boston

On the common

In the garden

Words that were educated down my throat with a silver spoon paid for with sleepless nights Anxiety attacks and friends that don't text back anymore

Got words like

Mature

Matriculation

Messy

Merde

"Mad black poet" who quit going to open mics in a city that listens with closed ears. Institutions that insinuate intensity instantaneously.

I learned I was never angry only wanting

Found words for that feeling in New York

While putting eggs in a basket

Resuscitation a reaction of Rythm

Running relentlessly

Felt like I only got 3 days worth of words before I had to wake up

So I stopped sleeping altogether

Stayed up searching for words in the night

In clubs where all words were laws scribbled in Brooklyn bathroom stalls

Words that brought me home wherever I was

[johnnyryall]

adrock

[elmergrowspoetry]

The time is always ripe for revolution

Finding evolution in the patterns of self seclusion like how taking time to process sounds like, "sorry, I'm booked that day" "I'm always with you in spirit though"

Like " I wish I could make it but I've got Gerbils racing hamster balls from one side of my skull to the other"

Like I'm sorry to be a distant brother

Friend

Lover

There is revolution shaking me awake at night and during the day I'm too tired to hang out

I take every chance to dance the revolution ragged

It's been running my spine jagged

The revolution is mind body

Soul music fueling the midnight ride boldly

Conducing instead refusing to sit aside

And abide by laws so unjustified

It's undignified watching genocide

Knowing to stand up might mean Suicide

The time is always ripe for revolution

The institution finds loop holes in the constitution which constitutes more persecution

It's truth I move in

Reframe

refrain

from mental pollution

An Uber driver once told me to pray to God to expand my mind

And I would find inner city boundaries baseless to bind me

I am bounding towards the type of revolution which takes its time to tighten up around your teeth till you're trained to bite back

[elmergrowspoetry]

An artist is someone who's experienced freedom then tries to convince the rest of society that its possible

[elmergrowspoetry]

Open  Letter to James Baldwin

This is an open letter to James Baldwin So my children know I wrote it and my brothers know I spoke it

-

James

Harlem still tempers the indignation of buckshots

Hollering for mangled niggers

And Boston hears the cries 

While London rallies in the street

Yet I am not free

James

Did survival always mean indulgence where intolerance is concerned

is that why they shot  the ones who spat it back in their faces

I ask myself if to be civilized is enough anymore

Their diplomas can't save me

They cannot understand me

Since they refuse to understand themselves

They cannot forgive 

Since they have yet to acknowledge wrongdoing 

But in its place claim superiority

Over what I cannot fathom

Since I am not a nigger

And they have yet to examine what need there was for a nigger to exist in the first place

In a society where the commerce of superiority is pimped 

I can no longer save face 

Not even through dawning a western mask of education

That once great chrysalis of hope

So I turn to the east for inner peace

in my gaze catch glimpses of what it must be to finally breathe

And revitalize my dignity  

James

We hit them streets again

And as you warned

They were waiting for us

 we did it anyway

at some point we had to choose to allow the world to deal with us

void of apology

so we took the children

And the dogs

so they shot them as equals

We took the scripture so they burned it and interpreted the flaming bush 

White Jesus casting tea leaves in a Voodoo shack 

The Sacrilege of convenience whizzing past our heads

Smoke too putrid to breathe 

Tears streaming down black faces

Tributaries to rivers our ancestors built Egypt upon 

Tributaries to rivers that floated cotton down for ginning 

Langston spoke of the rivers

the Negro still knows of them

James

The land grows ever weary

Though time has manifested- 

Progress-

Lies destitute  -

Though feigning ignorance

The inalienability  of the truth stands resolute

That the machinery of this country

Operates day in and day out

hour by hour

Until this hour

To keep a nigger in his place

Yet they still do not know what I want

What they do know is that they still  would not like to be black here

that is all the testimony I have ever needed

They still will not kneel with me

Yet my throat remains crushed

James was it hard to breathe 

When they shot all your friends

James they are still shooting

James how did you learn to breathe with bullet holes in your back

Did you write poems in the blood of our brothers

Was the blacktop your isle 

Was the lectern your sword 

James

They still refuse to know my name

Do I have to write it in blood?                                       

-

Elmer Martinez 6.6.20

[elmergrowspoetry]

Sometimes

I just want to cry

And feel as if

IT

matters

to anyone

besides myself

[elmergrowspoetry]

I don’t love reading my old poems anymore

Younger me didn’t take into account that people

They leave

And no matter how hard you try to do what you think is the right thing

Right isn’t the same to everyone 

And being right isn’t always the right thing to be 

Younger me didn’t take pause

when churning out those poems

They were the truth 

As in to say they hurt the most 

Like what’s good for me wasn’t always what was good for my friends and like I didn’t choose to be born hungry

I just kept trying to feed it

Fill the blackness with books

Dancing and lights

Never wanting to need to quantify the feeling of escape

I was so angry at the things I thought I could change by being angry

But caring and acting are estranged in the hearts of people who love themselves too much not to act on their “gut instinct”

Can no longer be made to care for the things that won’t care back 

Took to the road like a fiend to the cool drip

Flask in my pocket

The other holds a wick

Regret in my heart for the ones I no longer get to love 

Vouching reconciliation on pulsing wounds

Embraces I never thought would be cut short too soon

Haunting my daydreams

On the A train

On the Green Line

Busses with no place to plug in and knock out

Doing the bare minimum to keep mobile till the next stop 

No more, no less

Till my Hip-Hop beat drops

Asking myself how hard I’ll fall this time

Still trying to get up from the last

Sometimes just breathing is a win.

I just want to breathe.

I just want to breathe again.

How much air do I need to put in this poem.

So older me will read it.

[elmergrowspoetry]

i can see Lowell 

from a windowsill in Manhattan 

A shining light caught between the prison bars of a fire escape 

escapism the only option 

for a kid like me 

with hip-hop dripping off his toes 

i can see Lowell

though I no longer smell that crisp unbothered air 

the little church on Varnum no longer spies on my 

evening pacings

to the city limit

and back

the sound of back-road engines humming

 no longer an opportunity to flag down a Lowell friend 

On their way to do Lowell things-

who I haven’t seen since 

Lowell High School

there’s still Lowell left in these hands

there’s gotta be 

there’s gotta be…

sure as there’s a cozy coffee shop on Market Street

sure as there’s kids with school ID badges dripping round their necks 

..or else

pizza joints that put orange soda in the sauce 

in a little city by the river

i could see New York 

Boston- over the way 

the pine trees unwavering in the midst of father winter 

i tell myself I followed the Jazz 

like Jack- like Ginsberg

will I finesse a Beat of my own

or will Coltrane croon me down 

the Merrimack with that finicky horn

there’s still Lowell left in these hands 

on this tongue 

waltzing across this heart

hoping to never die 

i can see it all 

from my windowsill 

tender youth in motion 

my little City

by the river 

[elmergrowspoetry]

How does/can/is the historical culture of hip-hop changing the social misconceptions of the genre?

Recently I had a prospective creative collaborator ask me over text my thoughts on how or if hip-hop’s historical culture is changing the social misconceptions that surround it. Naturally, my hip-hop geek poked its head around the corner of my subconscious and out popped a four paragraph e-mail in reply. My ideas on the culture are a reflection of what I would like to see more of in the culture as well as my experiences over the last 8 years of being fully immersed in the underground hip-hop creative scene. Also, my views stem from 22 years of being a man of color who presents as “Black” to the general population. Like anything what I define as, “what cypher culture is” is subjective - meaning that cypher culture is different to everyone at the end of the day. However, the set of core ideals I laid out are ones I consider to be widely accepted in the forging of individual ideologies of what “cypher” means to people I have come in contact with over the years.

————

“I feel that the historical culture of hip hop is working towards -- and has consistently throughout its history worked -- as a self- cleansing mechanism. When our society assumes that the entire culture is polluted by drugs, violence, lawlessness, and otherwise undesirable individuals, the community produces tokens of illumination to counteract the identity of "lesser than" which is bestowed upon us. Examples of these tokens sometimes come in the form of people, or works of art stemming from the belief system of those people -- a belief system coded in the ideology of the cypher.

The cypher is composed by the community of people who choose to participate by the set of individually-forged principles based on core ideas of mutual support, self improvement, self realization, self-determination, patience, deeper understanding of the world through intimate introspection, and respectful ideological exchange. This as well as storytelling, the expansion of the imagination/perspective via fraternization with mirror images of the human experience within the context of the genre and collaboratively with genres related to the urban identity. Other prominent core ideas of the cypher include community building and education -- along with fulfillment in the realm of socio-economic growth, maintenance, and longevity. Giving back and standing for voices of socio-systematically disenfranchised populations originally and predominantly of color in our communities, and around the world.

When our society says, for example, "Hip-Hop promotes dropping out of school" over and over again for decades, because there have been examples of the glorification of dropping out by select prominent figures or a trend in dropping out in communities where hip-hop is prevalent, hip-hop holds society accountable acting as a system of cultural checks and balances that responds, " Is it our historical, cultural inner monologue and identification of the root of our misfortune which puts the systemic blame on white people for initiating the transatlantic slave trade which generationally (fed by segregation, then red lining during Jim Crow-era America) led to this drop-out problem specifically in communities of color, or is it that our collective consciousness is expanding in a way that threatens the power still held over us by a system of racism that caters to Western White Euro-American domination of the world by the practice of cypher culture, aka Hip-Hop."

In this way, hip-hop stands up for itself by saying, "you could blame this culture for being associated with a demographic which is dropping out of school as the cause of the issue, but also the historical facts point out that due to low resources in these same schools (because of a history of segregation and red lining which created the ghettos thus leading to poor black schools), aren't white people in power responsible for directly and willingly culturally-conspiring to put these these communities far from access to the proper resources to learn and achieve academically, without being put in situations where they need to drop out to then gain a higher probability of feeding a cycle of generational poverty within a system of capitalism dominated by the rich, white and elite?" “

————

The point of my example really was to highlight that Hip-Hop is often blamed for problems in the communities it’s in contact with by people from outside of the culture. However, I would ask- is hip-hop the problem or is it presenting solutions? By serving as a genre of social commentary on political issues like institutional racism I see the values of cypher culture to be a light in the darkness. Hip-Hop calls out the rhetoric of criticism and extrapolates the core of the problem through engagement with the topic via social dialogue. Whether that’s through fashion, street art, dance, music etc.. Hip-Hop’s historical culture speaks to it’s own truth and does a strong job at countering its critics through with the fruits of it’s ideology. To those who don’t understand the vernacular of the culture these concepts may not stick. But that’s just the thing, Hip-Hop doesn’t give a fuck if you understand, just that learn to respect it.

[elmergrowspoetry]

A Poem from behind my Cubicle

"How does one learn improvisation? The only answer is to ask another question: What is stopping us? Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves. What we have to express is already with us, is us,the work of creativity is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow"  -- Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch

-The way I feel about improvisation floats off the tip of my tongue and is caught in the ceiling fan.

- Spins round and round until it finally splatters across all the walls in this body I call home. While it congests my chest my right leg extends forward and all at once I am standing on toes too small to bear it

- Head snapping around to where I observe the reflection of a man who no longer apologizes for spontaneous twirling.

-Because who is he not to not spontaneously twirl as he pleases

- The way I feel about improvisation hugs me when the sun goes down at 4:00pm

-Doesn’t let me walk home alone in the cold and the grey

-reminds me that validation is a lone man’s journey down a cavern of propane gas lanterns prepped to explode at the slightest misstep

- puts me on the good foot like James Brown to avoid them

-Eeeeeeases the pain like David Ruffin  to remind me of myself

-Keeps my colors unchanged like Whitney Houston in that one song about not having a thing without that one person that one time

-My improv prays like Sam Smith hymnals that God let me out of chains cast in iron and blood makes me free as a child that hasn’t been taught words like, “Weird” or “Different” or “Compare”

- thinks not of the winter, validates only sunshine, knows itself- lends color to blank canvas regardless of collaborators.

-and when the worship has ceased and my body no longer cuts space I tuck my improvisation in my front pocket

-walk around

-feeling it at my fingertips

-like a secret I am always keeping

[elmergrowspoetry]

This is my poem with no Wine in it

void of the zing

full only with my own willpower not to waltz down the avenue to the liquor store 

look that cashier who knows me by my hat right in the face and say, “hows it been man” then walk out with enough justification still dripping out the corner of my mouth to smirk at the next guy comin in for a swig 

Uncarded because like me, my favorite cashier at Blanchard's is just trying to figure it out and like me, breaking a rule for a friend must bring him the feeling of control we both lack when we’re sober. 

I can’t code switch outa this one so I’ll swallow my sour pill with Rosé and call it a poetic gesture. 

but not tonight. 

No, tonight, this is my poem with no Wine in it.

Only Jazz as a life jacket

Keeping it high n’ dry

drye

dreye

[elmergrowspoetry]

I’ve always written best with a soundtrack to my stroke

maybe Louis Armstrong or Kendrick Lamar would swing by with a little shine and let me borrow a silhouette of them to wear on my lapel. Maybe 

Then again many nights Sam Smith looks out at me and guides my hand as he begs for forgiveness - maybe his serenade would coax and old soul ajar and finally I’d have my way with this regret that fills my belly. 

I’ve never felt this weightless. 

I’ve never been the type to make art for arts sake. To feel all the things I feel I am missing might do the trick. If I weren’t missing them so dismissively. 

Then again I might find a train of thought to tease the dormant to ignition. A soulful one filled with banished anger and all the “what ifs” of a younger man. 

I lived a lifetimes worth by 21. 

My fire burns a different hue now

I guess it just matters that it keep burning.