Getting Free | A Poem

This is a poem that explores a mythical event in my life when I freestyle-rapped in front of a group of people for the first time. It was an empowering and life-changing ritual that informs my life's work today and initiated me on the path of sharing freestyle rapping as a way to pray and play.

Transcript

It was in the Southern Hemisphere,

In a familiar but foreign land when I let my heart and throat become friends for the first time.

The anatomical beat in my chest was so dope,

Not even the 20-year-old wall made a fear.

Insecurity and projections could muffle the vibration.

Conversation between my heart and voice was woven of rhythmic rhyme and sent quivers to my lips.

Arrows on mission trips,

Slicing through the conditions,

Shields of who I thought I had to be.

Boing,

Hit the target of actually loving myself,

The whole self,

To love the parts that I kept on mute.

Improvising to the pulse about my mess-ups,

My mistakes,

My failures,

The fakeness I hated and others was none other than the fakeness in myself.

The heart and throat explored the taboos,

The skeletons,

The forgotten,

Repressed remnants,

The unforgiving bits,

The hatreds,

Even the karma of the ancients in these helixes.

The illusion of separateness became exposed.

These were my words,

But not my words that arose like a rose through the concrete.

The world's wound was wound in me,

Unwinding to a degree as I prayed my shard of shared humanity.

I freestyled rap so playfully,

In community,

To see,

To bless,

To say thank you.

After words became inadequate,

Something unlocked somatically and the rivers on my cheeks made puddles from how the laughter shaped my face.

Words like love and grace and freedom gave way to breath and giggling and sobbing.

Bliss hit my body,

I had to move.

I sprinted to a grassy hill and horizontally rolled down and turned into a child,

Sprawled out on a cricket field.

Bounced up in my newfound lightness,

I found I liked skipping and humming and rapping and encountering a stranger mowing his lawn.

I gave him a joyful greeting.

I was different after that day,

In ways I can't fully explain.

The mythical event of my life informs my work today.

My vocation is to liberate from the inside out,

Create pockets of pure expression,

To receive and give the blessing of an empowered voice finding home here in the circle of now where the center goes straight to the source.

Pure imagination in these unpredictable silences of beautiful truth.

The genius in me sees the genius in you.