"Skipping Beats" for Whitney

“”SKIPPING BEATS”

for Whitney

Some  (very special) times our children come 

With a Passion and a Perfectness

That make all of us lavish them w/Love.

So, when our wisdom seems to slow them,

They don’t heed.

But, hearts are only given so many beats.

.

Whitney, you could not have, truly, known 

The love you engendered,

The hearts that were surrendered

Because of the women you played, the words you sang or said.

But, now, we can touch you w/our spirits,

Pray for you our songs of Love and Dread.

And, since the lines between art and life are,             

 Now, blurred, can one cancel out the other?

Because, truthfully, I ponder,

‘What will be the impact of your life,

Ultimately,

On the Wanna Be Whitney’s?’

Requiem for a Suicidal Soldier

War is constantly being aware that every moment/movement could be your last. 

It's never completely relaxin'.

I was always ready to react triple fast. 

'Cause  war is sometimes fillin' up fat seconds

With much movement and stress -

Sometimes makin' mistakes,

But, never gettin' caught slippin'

Or trippin' 

When fiddlin' away  fat seconds

Can equal Death.

Dyin' is logical when you look back at it.

When they write it all down, 

There was a reason

He was found dead - shot in the head -

Another casualty in battle - bullet in his brain,

Beer can in his hand.

"He'll never make that mistake, again."

The End of the Gang War in L.A.

I Have Been A Student of Imam W.D. Mohammed for Over 30 Years

So, I try to take just some of his concepts and use them in big ways, major ways to solve society's and my community's problems.

I have a CD where he talks about me, specifically, in one of his Ramadan sessions, (October 5th, 2007). He had, somehow,  gotten a hold of a copy of my book,  The Black Curse. I don't know how because I was ambivalent about showing it to him, though he had inspired me to write it.  The complete title, however, is N*gg*s - The Black Curse,  and it has a very controversial jazz/hip hop music track that uses the despicable word. 

But, he spoke of me, a high school English teacher in L.A. who had developed his concept of a racial curse in my book. He said he wished he had brought the book with him. Obviously, I was greatly relieved and flattered.  

     I had heard a lecture where he had called us, the Black people in America, a cursed people, and I  realized he had given me the key to my dilemma, opened up my understanding of why so many Black students could not stop cursing in my English classes and why I could not get the same Black kids to read.  Why some adorable little Black girls would rather be cute than smart and couldn't be both at the same time, etc., etc., etc... They were literally  and literarily "cursed".

So, I wrote a book and I gave that book to the Crips and the Bloods (Rollin' '60's, 69 & 67 Eas' Coases, 8 Tray Gangster Crips, Black P Stones and Rollin'20's Bloods) because I already knew from my research  that illiteracy or, more precisely, antiliteracy was the cause of much of the murder - a subconscious reaction to the oppression of an outdated Huckleberry Finn/Of Mice and Men, et al subliminally bigoted canon of literature that guaranteed their specific breed would be antiliterate and oppressed, and oppression (functional illiteracy in the most technological age in world history in this case) is worse than slaughter (death), nowadays. 

It is not lack of the skill that  keeps them illiterate but lack of sufficient will to concentrate on deciphering words they care nothing about. 

And, I ridiculed this egregious curse with cartoon characters and stinging satire. Like my perspicuous teacher, I used humor and a dialect that did not offend but disarmed them. Then I fed them profound lessons that taught them (subliminally) to seek Allah's blessings. Over the next 4 years, I sold and I gave hundreds of books away. 

And, since then, miraculously, somehow,  the gang war in L.A. has gone away. Allahu Akbar! 

Look for my new book, I, Too, Can Create Light  DonaldBakeer.com