A Question of Blackness

Am I Black Enough ?

Beyond the skin and collection of parts that I identify with, I look through the eyes and wonder if this is enough?

Am I Black Enough? Political, active, forward-thinking, my mind churns out new theories, homilies, and analogies seeking to break through the reductio ad absurdum, the banal and bland bludgeoning. There is a blackness beyond black, beyond race or night. An inking oblivion where every color and characteristic disintegrates into the cosmic gloam. There is a black quintessence at the heart of each atom, in the breath of each pause, in the howls of the ragged sun. Blackness so dark that it is invisible and omniscient. Void of color and emotion, this force draws the Gods in, so that even they circumambulate around her heaving ebony breast in order to prostrate before her veiled face.  

Am I Black Enough? Has care and comfort weakened the ferocious knife needed to excavate this darkness. To incise the base of my spine and disembowel it, hewn out on the railroad bones.

Here in the darkness I carve out these insufficient and incomplete words. The full expression has not been achieved. They think I’m talking about race or nationality or gender or orientation or artistic persuasion. They think it’s reactive instead of a protoplasmic primal howl of midnight children marauding through the sunless catacombs.

I gnash my pen’s teeth against the chalk white spasms which crumble into dust, leaving behind the apparition of deities.

I grind a dark tempest into celestial sirens calling for night, for darkness, for the blackness behind the sun and seeded in each syllable.