FRANCES                           

You brought love to Los Angeles.

Limping – leg broken – but unbowed,

81, and barely balancing on your cane,

You are handicapped but not disabled,

Dignified and delicate,

Always scurrying, self deprecating Queen.

Will like Rock shaped into exquisite art,

Battle scarred but Beautiful and unbowed,

Unbroken. You’re undefeated;

You’ve reached the highest human state of ihsan

(constantly giving Love).

Scootin’ up and down stairs to do it.

With hurt heavy boot painin’ you say,

“Satan, don’t hold me down!

Don’t stop me from goin’ to church, Lord.

I may be 81; I may have just got this cast put on, Lord.

My foot may be sprung,

But I’m gonna hop this hurt heavy boot, Lord,

To see my great grandbaby, Ishmael, graduate.

I’m gonna push back the pain, Satan.

‘Cause God got me on a mission to bring LOVE

Back to my family, again.”                                                                By Bakeer (2015)

FORNICATION: When Social Becomes Venereal

(9/16/13)

This life can, gladly,  go into extra innings if you’re winning. 

But, if you drink hard liquor and/or use hard drugs; it’s hard.

So, if you don’t want to live hard; stop sinning.

Stop!   So, your babies can be free

From disease and poverty.

This life can be bright, happily full of struggling but not, necessarily, suffering.

Great expectations and  victories!  

Families can have many generations without the degradation

Of D.U.I.’s and drug addictions, violent marriages maligned w/suspicion

And devoid of vision; damned to divorce, utterly, cursed by weak traditions

That leave everybody victims.

Illicit sex precedes abortion, then, the deadly decision

That makes  murderers instead of mothers,

Maybe makes you love/consider kids a little less,

Leaves you jaundiced, partially blinded and could care less,

Callused, future clients for foster care.

Stop taking for granted that everybody on the planet

Is weak, morally, secretly dirty and  not what they appear to be.

No, everybody’s not doin’ it ;

And, every generation does not have to fall

For fornication

Then, learn to lie in denial when social becomes venereal,

And the jinn reveals himself as your sex appeal.

Eschew evil, and cultivate your taqwa, your Spiritual Will!

Clean will be  fashionable forever .

Find your niyyah, your purpose, and refocus.

Lust will be one of your first tests and one of the worst.

Lust, is the Wass Wass , The Whisperer, who speaks to the hearts

Of all Women/Men; The jinn who brings worry and distraction.

When you are confronted with or surrounded by his songs,

You must Pray. Keep Allah close.  Use Him as a weapon, a haven, a shelter.

Prayer is a  vehicle that helps you refocus and combats demons.

Never let too much time get between you and your last prayer.

Food for Thought

We hide, comfortably, from our greatness in Poverty.  It is a justifiable excuse for not inventing the internet or cell phone or any great technology since the stoplight.

I fear our Bill Gateses and Paul Allens are being concussed into mediocrity on football fields and basketball courts  before they can create their great apps  or design and pilot  the latest spacecraft.

We shoot for the stars in games and forget the stars in the universe. When will some of our parents commit themselves to raising Great Women Leaders like the Williams parents committed to raising great tennis players?

Are these unborn the angels that can lead us out of the sordid traditions of Comfortable Poverty, ie., the inability to love till death, the inability to save, to own, to be self-sufficient,  to be charitable, and to embrace literacy and the sciences rather than being distracted by bouncing balls?

Maybe our culture’s  salvation is being put second to possible careers in professional tennis, and basketball, golf, and volleyball.

Furthermore, where are our Kings, Malcolms, or Mahatma Ghandis? Could they be those most committed to the religions of Song and Dance?  Did we trade for Michael Jackson  instead of  another  Adam Clayton Powell?  Could we have had another Malcolm instead of Miles?

Why not make songs that program us to do more than  smile, dance, and romance? Allah’s sound vibrations have so much more power.  Where is the music that ends hunger and  abortion, renews universal love, and unites all faiths? Are we trying to convince our precocious geniuses that they should, only,  try to be Snoop Lion or Prince?

Must  we continue to aim so low leaving those who fail littered in neighborhood trash heaps, almost made its and has beens?  Victims of tender knees, and backs, and broken brains,  corrupt lawyers, managers, and wicked accountants who see them, only, as sustenance for their own capital gain,  every generation,  over and over again  -  willing victims of  the same sucker game.

   

Flirts? No, I Don’t Think So

Women have often flirted with me, some boldly, some subtly.

But more than half, well over 50% of these  coquettes were saying “voulez vous couche avec moi”.  Many had ulterior motives, and could care less that I was happily married with several kids. They did not seek marriage, only discreet but lusty interludes between cancerous relationships.

These witches, these jinni, who practice  secret arts, the adulteresses who reside in thinly masked denial of their sins.  These skeezers, these T.H.O.T.S., these hizzoes, these femme fatales  who never reflect on the dozens of men they go in and out of in their  scandalously sinful lives, the  HPV, the herpes, the HIV, the gonorrhea, and et cetera that they don’t even count, hide behind innocuous flirts, but caveat emptor (buyer beware)

When I look back upon my life, I am more proud  of  the women I turned down or we found some mutual reason not to have illicit sex than I am of the coquettes,  my so-called conquests. In fact, they are sins for which I want to repent – not the women but the sex that stained our relationships. 

This subject is so radioactive  that I am circumspect.  Any discussion of  past  sexual sins can become precedent for continuing morally weak traditions and possibly curtailing crucial growth. 

But, I became a man in the midst of  the Sexual Revolution; and, when I graduated from Cal State L.A. in 1973 “the next person who came through the door” was the sexual preference in a campus survey.  Orgies and experimentation were S.O.P. for entertainers, and White girls had discovered Black men and made fashionable the quickie. 

I was a wannabe actor under the tutelage of  the Grand Dame, Beah Richards and others of that ilk  at the renown Inner City Cultural Center with some of the most beautiful sorceresses in America, but I was, also, a 100 + Muhammad Speaks newspaper selling happily married F.O.I., so their siren songs never quite hypnotized me. 

I have had a voluptuous  actress strip nude to try to entice me (and anyone else in range of her sultry spell), they’ve offered menage a trois’s but, fortunately, I had a woman equal to 3 of them, so I was able to play it off.

Islam has been my protective aura for nearly 50 years. It taught me how to choose a mate, and that has been key to my successes.  Without  a tireless connection with The Spirit  entertainers are  bombarded by flirtatious sexual invitations. The young ones don’t  realize they are scarring their Souls.  They will never have  a lifelong mate because it’s the clean for the clean and the dirty for the dirty.

Au contraire, I have reverence for the women who are virtuous, who hold themselves above  Shaitan’s   lewd invitations. These are women with whom a man can only be successful. The true, “ride or die”, “Fo’ life” mothers  and  wives, like Camille Cosby and Michelle Obama;  I’m widowed to  2,   Sharon and Anjail Bakeer, and married to another, the indefatigable, imperturbable Sharyn Muhammad Bakeer.

These women  outgrew the curse of good looks and passed the moral tests to become sui generis, women whose words you can trust.

 Flirts?  No, I don’t  think so.  

(Epitaph)

How Much Farther Away Could The Jannah Be?

How could I possibly be surprised,

If I died … this time?

Even a cat only has 9 lives.

In retrospect

I’ve dodged Death so often

I should pre-purchase my coffin.

I should prepare where I plan to leave my remains,

Minimize my losses and maximize my gains.

I should write my own obituary so I don’t have to worry

About which cemetery will bury me,

Or, how to include  my sister Joanne and my Brother Berry…

But, realistically,

Since I am about to be Blessed to turn 70, Inshallah,

How much farther away could The Jannah  be?  

© Bakeer 2014

The Panacea

For a Myriad of Black People's Problems

     Having recently celebrated 50 years of being proud and aware of my Blackness, I have been reassessing.  'Does militantly asserting my right to be defined as Black benefit me?'

     I do believe I was less assertive in integrated company before I was Black.  I  was often intimidated and had an inferiority complex around Whites. Indeed, my Blackness cured that, Fa sho'. But, is there any negative price for forcing the world to call me Black? Isn't there some baggage, also.

     What if I could tell you how to get everybody who is not Black to drop every negative connotation bein' Black has? What if I could tell you how to get any job you are qualified for and want, badly.  What if I could make everyone you encountered but did not know have high expectations of you?

     Naw, but you would not do it.  Even though you know what I say is true, you won't even attempt it, even though it's not illegal, immoral, or physically taxing.

     Think deeply about what I am suggesting.  The next time you fill out an application or questionnaire that asks your race, put "Negro". If the boxes are "African American" or "Black", cross them out and write "Negro".

      If questioned, say you are proud to be a "Negro" because everyone knows Negroes are dependable, agreeable, and will work twice as hard as everybody on the job or team for that matter.

     Jackie Robinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington, and a plethora of renown others were Negroes and proud of it.  If you proudly represent yourself as a Negro, the positive traditions - the struggles, the achievements connoted in that no longer despised name, qualify you for special treatment that you don't even have to demand.

      To be delineated from N*gg*s is worth it in itself.  There are no Negro Crips, Bloods, terrorists, drug dealers, pimps, or prostitutes, and it's unusual for a Negro to go to jail or abandon his/her family. Almost all Negroes are devoted to The Almighty and love to read.  They are industrious and assets to any organization.

      Yes, in fact, I'm going to insist on being addressed as a Muslim Negro rather than African American or Black which, generally, imply (whether we like it or not) racist tendencies and an angry history.  And, most definitely, the terms do not concoct positive imagery to Whites or Blacks, or even other Muslims.  Bilal ibn Rabah (S.A.W.) was a Muslim Negro and a spiritual icon in Islamic history, nevertheless, we, still, disdain the term "Negro". 

      Whereas, African American, Black, and certainly, N*gg*  are no longer positive descriptive appellations for us, it is time for a change. And, I believe "Negro" would be a most effective and easily adapted to alternative.

My Dream

My Dream

I want to die riba  free -

Free of interest bearing debt, completely.

And, I want to free my children

So, they can pass on

Mortgage free real estate

And a riba free tradition.

I believe years from now

We will view our new tradition

Much like we do freedom

From chattel slavery

After The Jubilee.

This is my primary economic goal.

I want to free my Soul, 

Eternally.