Can we have an honest conversation about a black man’s pain?
The requirement to carry the world on shoulders. 
To be our mother’s keepers and our sister’s warrior. 
The desire to shut every emotion down because of how we had grown up?
The beatings we caught just cause we had spoke up?
The mistrust of therapy because his first therapist couldn’t make simple efforts.
Like looking me dead in my eyes and telling me i was lying about something that was sitting in my folder. 
How hard it is for a black man to hold on?
To man up!
To trudge on.
Working at dead end jobs because Bermuda doesn’t offer too many alternatives.
When the only sense our freedom seems to be when your friends are burning shit.
But what if you don’t escape and just let shit sit?
What if you take on other’s pains until yours gets pushed deep within.
Cause how are you supposed to acknowledge your pain when your 50 something year old Fijian landlord comes to you with her every problem? 
When you can’t make a single friend?
And your roomate’s alarm be 3am hollering. 
When you barely can tolerate yourself,
Because you’re too blessed to have any problems.
When you think back to ATL living and remember than a kid on the bus put a lit firecracker in your backpack and caused it to spark. 
And how your shirt almost caught on fire but you were too quick to react.
And you wished you would’ve just let it burn because that might’ve been easier.
But your auntie’s first reaction was blaming you for what happened.
You don’t let the fact that shit hurts show, you just show no reaction.
Or how you were a waste of a good student. 
Never living up to the potential others saw in you.
But when you were “one of the best scholarship interviews i’ve ever had” you still can’t get any scholarship money?
Or how at 27 you turn to jokes just to keep your spirit running?
I could go deeper and shit but what’s the fucking point.
I have to man up! like always and just keep on going. 
But in spite on all of that, the black man has to keep on flying. 
We have to break the curses of wife beaters,
Children’s spirit defeaters.
Of broken homes and broken societies. 
All while i’m dealing with the war that’s inside of me.