In Response to Your Words on My Wall by TZ
In a trance like state I began my child
Take orders without meaning to
Learning to lean which way without wanting to
I didn’t realize I was growing up not right
Not the way it seemed my brother was
Or my father my mother, aunts, uncles, cousins
And whomever before me, they all seemed to know
What to do which way to cross the street
How to tie their shoes, but not me
I didn’t know that I should have already known
Those things
I didn’t know that I was a certain color
A race a religion, a point of origion, until my mother
Told me to walk down the street in a straight line
Until I got to the house of worship
And stay there until services were over
And because I realized that no one was following me
On that straight line down the street
I thought, no one is watching me
I can go where I want for a few hours
And then go home, and none will be wiser
When I began to cut school cause I didn’t like
The class I was in, the kids I was with, the label that was put on me,
It was when I came back
I was no longer the same color, the same type,
I was someone who had broke the rules
Someone who had gone over the wall
Outside the rhythm of things,
It is from these beginnings I sprang and journeyed many rivers
Through life’s water, one of the truths I know
Life and universe through death and infinity beyond
Are long learnings of light and existence
Of many scores of beings from swans
To that man in the elevator
And the way the bay shimmers in the sun
At a certain time of day
All there for the eye to see
It is the beauty of the eternal infinity
Of the universe from within and without
For you and for me
