#becauseblack

As much as our parents and families we come from can guide and instruct us, we have to admit that most of our elders can be out of touch with our reality which leaves us to wing life while trying to make sense of ourselves.

In turn and in return we wind up making decisions that lead us to heartache, triggered traumas and moral injury in our pursuit of love, belonging, a better future and fulfilment.

All these are achievable. All these are a reality to enjoy when you so choose and a past littered with mistakes, errors, actions based off ignorance, shame and guilt that present as arrogance doesn’t steal from what you can still become.

When you so decide, life, in all its bounty and joy, is yours to live to its abundant fullness.

Just don’t give up on yourself.

— Hakeem Anderson-Lesolang

Wa Batho Batsho Therapy

You speak silent prayers that break the best of things and wonder why goodness knows your doors but never meets it’s entrance.

You move in ways that augur the worst of omens and cry alone when love wealth, you’re convinced will find you a permanence if you trial it in your thighs.

You love like fear. You hold like death. You cum like brokenness. You kiss like ash and taste like goodbye.

How’d you think this would end?

new affrimations & wallpaper excerpts from #rosewater.

This spring. Healing arrives. Becoming dwells.

I’m learning to

Finish poems

I started.

I’m learning to

Relinquish hearts

I had no business

Sharing my trust

With or at first,

Being trusted with.

What I know of the difficulties that come with unlearning as a black man is that for beauty to become of black men, hard work and patience need to both exist on a plain field. It’s a cruel misgiving to expect people who’ve been robbed of the space and room to be vulnerable when they need to, to get what wealth comes with it.

Society has robbed black men of that goodness and still does. It’s bad enough the sheer presence of us is ascribed to impending doom and danger but add to that the strain that comes with being labelled less a man for being human and feeling and showing that you feel as much as your female counterparts do too.