Undefined: A poem about Poets

Undefined

People,
Parading around pain
is not poetry. The point
which where we

draw our lines and rays
towards the sun
is being missed.
We are parenting parallelograms
with uneven sides and angles
that appear in acute ways
but are so far obtuse
that it cannot be right.

Relating modern music
or society to slavery
doesn’t make an awesome African American
poem unless providing a solution.
We are a people tattooed in torture
but fully sitting in the seat
to allow someone to etch sorrow in our skin.

The color of our paper is conspiring
in classes and behind pages of anthologies
stating that we should not write
about experiences that are definitely there.

If poetry is only old, dead, male and white,
than by no means is what is scribed bow
that. It is illustrations of egg shells
hatched and broken at birth
making mosaics out of story.
It is a problem we aren’t taught
to solve, but to just show the work
that brought us to the conclusion,

Undefined.

A mean rhyme scheme
may seem
to beam what we deem
supreme poetry or lyrics
but it is no more than the tune
of the Orcas in the ocean
echoing sounds,
it isn’t their original voices.

If you must be woman than be more
than a queen, be a goddess for goodness sake.
Sculpt yourself in the mud
made from your earth bearing womb and tears.
You will be judged until you
bake cakes of demons with your face
and see rain clouds in your car,
and after all that like
Sylvia and Anne
they will still judge you.

You are greater than that
you are our Lourdes and Angelou.
You are a heaven
battling hells they refuse to read.

If you must be a hue of man
than douse yourself in it’s
bottomless bucket of splendor
and paint with the brushes
borrowing down from
your hardened knuckles.

If you be young and White
than don yourself as a cloud
and fly into forever rather
than be as unmoving and unchanging
as your marble predecessors.
Be uniquely you, undefined.

If you be Black know your possibilities
are as endless as the night sky.
Don’t be confined in corners
like shadows any longer
because eventually there will be
light coming to erase you.

If you are Asian know now
that the origami unfolded
has always brought
wise willows and wonderful words.
Your history is as rich
as any others and always will be.

If you are Latino
raging bulls are awaiting
to be released from the salsa
sitting inside of your veins.
Do not allow yourself
to be overlooked.

If you hail from the Middle East
the desert is not empty
but filled with a treasured legacy
endowed to you. Your words rejected
by the canon of the European
have been powerful cannons of their own for ages.

And all else must remember that this
undefined art we create
is made of nothing more
than the ink welled in our eyes,
the lead resonating in our bones,
and the stanzas stretching the strength of our muscles.

We can’t be defined into
experiences of the excruciating,
memories of the melodious,
intelligent images in sentences
or stories structured in Sestinas.

Our work will remain as diverse
as the people who read them.
We will continue to collide
planets of thought
over what is and is not something
that we don’t really have the power to decide.

We are undefined,
a quantity of infinity equal only to quality.
We are undefined,
a question unanswered because it can’t be.
We are undefined,
and this is our definition.