SAID SHAIYE
Cakey // Urgency
Run that back, Turbo.
Niggas is hittin me up for money left and right and I think – what does it look like when someone decides they no longer feel generous?
It hurts man.
Been a long time since I wrote like this.
Wish I could escape my body.
My life, wish I could escape it.
I feel it closing in on me.
I feel ashamed of something everything my people everyone fuck everyone fuck.
I’m so tired of these games we play.
So have you gotten married yet?
You must be less than.
You have a wife and kids?
You look the type.
No, dawg, I’m just on my own.
Struggling to breathe.
Pisces out of aquiline.
I know life is hard when I have an urge to drive to another state and be in the wilderness
secluded with my thoughts and fear.
No one to lie, no one to care.
Just smell that forest breeze and let it ease.
I wish I had that moment, right the fuck now.
I wish my forehead didn’t feel like it was about to impact right the fuck now.
I’m hungry but not.
I’m sleepy but awake.
I sleep too much lately.
My desire for carbs has gone through the roof.
Belly expanding like young metro and 21.
Feeling like a low energy savage.
Feeling like & like idk Mike & Ike & Tina Snow.
But I’m both.
I’m fighting myself.
Trying to heal myself.
Trying to find myself.
I don’t know why.
The guitar gently weeps.
The heart strings twinge.
9th grade intro to piano class, enrolled in secret = music is haram.
And my teacher looked at me, smiling, with his white ass horn-rimmed glasses.
You know, Said, you’re the poster child for birth control.
I thought it was a joke or a compliment.
I wish I could go back in time and shove a fist down his throat.
Can you breathe now, whitey?
Still got it in you to make fun of little Black boys who already hate themselves?
Who come to school smelling like piss?
Who, 13, 14, 15 still wet the bed every night?
Who wake up in the middle of the night.
Clutching sheets, alarmed eyes.
Feeling their thighs caked in urine, their pajamas plastered to them,
their sheets plastered too,
plasticky bedding holding it all together like glue.
Can you see the lines imprinted in that young boys thighs?
Like ocean waves carving dunes in sand.
Can you feel the pain in his voice?
Like Michael Jackson’s victims on the jury stand.
Hooyo storming into his room.
Cutting on the light.
.
Her voice cutting even more so.
How can you ever hope to find a
wife
If you wet the bed every night?
What woman will put up with that?
With you?
I hang my head down low, and if there was a hat on it, it would surely flow off the top and fall right atop the pile of crumpled stinky dried piss caked sheets in the corner of my room where I hid everything which brought me shame.
I fall asleep to Lauryn Hill.
Bob Marley.
Turn your lights down low.
I clutch myself.
I wonder if there’s a life in this life that is devoid of pain.
I clutch myself.
I turn my lights down low.
I lay on a blue mat, a twin sized bed, Stevens Court, University of Washington, 2007.
My eyes stare off.
I feel the lights coming down low.
Though.
It is broad day.
This is my first suicide attempt since age 11.
I am 19.
I made it 8 years before I relapsed.
Into wanting to die.
Sometimes I still feel like.
Life is a heavy hand.
Pressing sand.
Compacting me.
I don’t want to die.
But sometimes.
I wish it felt better to be alive.
Sometimes.
I just want Lauryn Hill to sing me to sleep.
In a voice that eased my pain.
Ease my pain.
Sometimes.
I see the correlation between the blue mat at Stevens Court and the blue mat in Park Lake Homes.
Same twin sized mattress, too small for my body at age 13. At age 19.
I’m 32 and I just bought my first queen sized mattress.
I’ve been glued to a blue plasticky twin mat for my entire life.
The metaphorical piss stains are still glued to my sheets, to my thighs.
I turn my lights down low.
I let the beat ride.
Let it ride.
Let it.
E T E R N A L A T A K E
BREAK> BREAK > BREAK <\BREAK>
\\\
Hey Diary,
It’s me, Falling Apart.
I mean, it’s you.
I mean,
I feel like a monster.
Is it my fault?
Why
Or
Why not?
Why am I here?
(to make it)
This pain?
(gotta take it)
You know it comes with the territory, don’t
Tell me you thought you would wander off
Calmly into the night
This writing shit ain’t nothing polite.
But tell me something good?
You know,
As A Man,
More sensitive than most,
You’re set up to feel
More than most
Your central processing system
Nervous system
Limbic system
Your touch it, bring it, push it, systematic
Automatic, Systematic
DOWHATYOUDOPLAYA
You are hard-wired for soft-intuition
You feel the fuzzy bits of caterpillars before touching them
You hear monarch heartbeats in the midst of functions
Do the thizzle dance
Now exit stage left
Now plow through a cantaloupe
Extendo Dullen Spoon
Muslims on shrooms
Confused?
Chewing cerebellum hearts
Medulla oblongata, Bobby Boucher couldn’t holla
Hippocampus feeling extra tactile
Recalls memories of
Black//
child//
white//
child//
black//
an//
mild//
crack//
vial//
Now Massage my forehead
Now Perform till your soul-dead
Now Blast Lil Uzi Vert:
E T E R N A L A T A K E
Now consider the lobster
Boil it
Now consider yourself a monster
Soil it
Now take your dreams, blow them into a crack pie
Light it
Now take your trigger arm, cock back
Recoil it
Now write a poem, scratch that, add milk
Spoil it
Now color your skin with a Crayola 48 plot
Foil it
Now consider yourself a goner, it’s 12:12 don’t smoke marijuana.
You work hard for everything you have, & all you have half the time, is half a stab.
Half a carnation on my writing pad.
On your writing pad.
You are I and I am him.
With our powers combined, spit phlegm till it ignites in the air like magicians extraordinaire or like at the circus show, catch me rolling down the window for a tall elephant remote control grab the boat, unfold the moon.
It should be noted that I’m writing this poem prior to breaking up with the most recent love of my life.
It seems that, for someone whose lived a thousand lives in 33 years, finding “THE ONE” may take another 33 years, or thousand lives, whichever comes first.
The girls come flocking because I’m sensitive. Then they go running when they find out just how sensitive I’m. Used to have money, but no confidence. Now I got confidence, no money.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll die alone.
Scratch that – spoil it – break down the beat and recoil it. Pow. Let it go. Watch the Uzi Vert off the finger roll, George Gervin. Money Mike with a pistol on Halloween night; Cold Swerving.
Drunk off Eric Sermon. Four door chevy suburban. Or A Ford, no Tom. Now I’m in magazines I can’t even afford to cop, dream of buying Gordon Gartrell sweaters off of cheddar from cops.
Why, Said, do you feel such a need to be accepted?
Even by people who could care less?
Can you not see, young padawan, that kind of love can only be provided by grown up you?
- You don’t feel like you belong here
- People look away from you when you enter rooms
- Even though it was all good just a week ago
- Niggas was keeping it extra cordial
- But then you let it slip that you thought you had BPD
- Then you saw a FB memory from 7 years ago
- You don’t feel like you belong here
- People look away from you when you enter rooms
- Even though it was all good just a week ago
- Niggas was keeping it extra cordial
- But then you let it slip that you thought you had BPD
- Then you saw a FB memory from 7 years ago
- Claiming to be Bipolar
- And now you’re on FB making retraction posts
- No BPD here, No BiPolar Disorder
- Just CPTSD
- You’re so infatuated with letting the world know
- EXACTLY what’s wrong with you
- And when you find that there’s nothing wrong with you
- You search for a new something wrong with you
- Some clinical definition
- Something convoluted
- You think you have the game figured out
- And no matter how ok you become with yourself
- Some part of you comes sneaking in
- S C R E A M I N G
- You must be broken
- Sum wrong wit ya, nigga
- Did you keep the receipt?
- See if you can return yourself
- Get a refund
- Put it in your pocket
- But ain’t no pocket left
- Because you took yourself back to the original pocket
- Your mother’s womb
- And now there’s nothing left of you
- Just consciousness
- Just black closing in
- Is that what you want, Black?
- I love you, bro, but sometimes you make it so hard
- To love you bro
- To be you bro
- To be us bro
- Whichever inner child, or teen, is poking his head through
- In between these furious lines
- I want you to know:
- I love you too
- Even when I’m mad at you
- Even when you tire me
- Even when I hate myself
- All of myself, not just some of myself
- Even when I reject a girl before she has a chance to reject me
- Now I’m writing this poem
- Hoping it’ll tell me
- Some insight
- To this girl should I be married?
- Leave her behind should I?
- How much of this is influenced by the bevy of smiling couples you saw on IG yesterday?
- Oops, you broke form – turned one line into two
- Get back right, you must get right
- Laundry folded and pressed and smelling just right
- Now I’m trying to get right
- Get right
- Right in the head
- Must be left
- Cuz nothing I say is making any sense
- And I don't want this flow to end
- Don’t want to stop writing
- Baby baby baby cant you see
- What you do to me
- I’m just not escalating
- Or exciting
- My throat hurts now
- Eyes bulge wild
- Call me Bernie Mac
- Waiting for this girl to call
- So I can break up with her
- And when she asks why
- I wont’ have a solid reason
- So what does that say about me?
- I love you, bro, I g2g
. . .
. . . .
;;;;
Said Shaiye is a Somali writer who calls Minneapolis home. He is an MFA Candidate and Graduate Instructor at the University of Minnesota. He uses writing to heal from childhood trauma and help others do the same. He has had work published or is forthcoming in Diagram, Rigorous, Bluntly, New South and the Muslim Writers at Home Anthology. Find him at www.saidshaiye.com & @sameoldsaid