The Great Blue

I have been called the whitest black person a person has ever known.

Who was it that thought

Intelligence is appropriated to white people,

Such that I am labeled

In such a way?

A man manages his own path to destiny,

And a wandering boy finds liberating knowledge,

Their cacophonous words can be like the grey of dimmed gaslights

My unique fate ignored, my novel vision darkened

Yet not forgotten,

Just not yet real enough to be touched

Just not yet worthy enough to join the Great Blue.

Am I athletic and passionate

Only because I am black?

Perhaps as a joke or truth,

As banal mockery or partial frankness,

Why are white persons stereotyped as fragile nerds

Such that a black man's strength is perhaps unrecognized

Or feared as strange?

No.

It is not by the color of my skin

That I know myself,

But rather I see

My own beauty

By the color of my mind.

Because not everything is black and white.

Some things are grey,

And some people are grey,

And some things are lifeless.

I don’t want to be a grey zombie, a ghost, doomed to be empty and faceless,

To be a white man who can’t empathize with another unlike himself.

I don’t want to be lost like a smoke, unrealized, barely visible,

To be a black man who can’t empathize with another unlike himself.

I don’t want to be forever a boy, full of potential, yet never realized, matured

Whose passionate, intelligent love was never known,

Whose inner dignity never fully divulged.

His soul would be like a vapor of smoke,

Barely real and fleeting,

Barely alive and passing away.

No.

Who would wish for that?

A grey mist wishes to whirl to a hurricane,

And a billowing cloud to flood a flowing torrent,

Their diaphanous wisps are a dream’s grey ghosts

With great potential endowed, with great anima imbued

But yet uncrystallized.

How could I fail to realize

What I truly am, what I truly wish to do

Even if my dreams are not adulted

Not yet real enough to be touched

Not yet worthy enough to join the Great Blue?

I don’t think about how white or black I am.

Instead, I strive to be a blue person.

I dream to be like the free, azure sky,

Majestic and deep,

Mysterious as the ocean is below it, with a sense of eternity to it.

I don’t want to be trapped and stagnant, or have my mind clouded by fog or politics,

But I want to be grounded and powerful like a raging river,

Ever changing, yet staying the same,

Passing, yet loyal,

Powerful, yet life giving.

Grey is the lifelessness

The boy finds himself born into

The gloom in his family’s eyes

When the cares of life threat to undo

It is the egg outgrown

The fragile shell he glimpsed through

Towards the blue sky far above.

He knew from that love at first sight,

Where home truly was.

Blue are her eyes

The calm that surrounds him

In her presence.

Blue are the tides that calm me

That ebb and flow

With the lilting sway of her hips

As she’s wading in,

And the waves caressing the shore.

Blue is the lifegiving water

The boy seeks to bind himself to

Giving, receiving the life of her moist lips

Breathing, animating

His soul to its core.

But how grey I am,

Greying have I grown!

Weary is the soul of the fighter

Sacrificing, protecting,

Yearning to reach the sky

The color has drained from his face,

As he has given all of his life.

But grey is also the stone

That I build upon,

It is the launchpad

The eagles lonely cliffside.

So, watch me

As I spread my black wings

And see how I conquer the sky,

With a leap of faith, I soar

And with joy I join the Great Blue.