BOHEMIAN RAPTURE: Part I
by Khalil Somadi 

How can one be both bohemian and domesticated at once?
I suppose I've always been a bit of the bohemian. Loving freely, smiling easily on the outside though terribly serious on the inside. And caught up in movement, all the time: eyes always watching, drinking life; mind always cutting deeply into any scenario life presented me until I saw what lay beneath. At the core.
My father taught me that, unintentionally.
He was a severe disciplinarian using sex to diminish my whimsical nature and reduce my unruly spirit until it became controllable.
But it could not be controlled.

The older I became, the more gifted at leaving my physical confinement by tapping into the unleashed reservoir of creativity wild in me. Words would come to me, in vivid colors, while i was awake and while I slept. Words that were outrageous in an environment tightly laced by secrecy and faux righteousness! I didn't care about keeping up appearances.  Was sick of it! My father's abuse of me lit in me a burning for truth. A craving for disclosure, and living life unretouched, raw and beautiful because of it.
Beauty.
Women had it.  So did the men.
I basked in the beauty of the women and men I met... breathing deeply the laughter we shared, dancing well into the night many nights with my lips pressed against their necks and the scent of their skin filling my nostrils with their captivating and effervescent spice. My heart was happy to join with theirs without hesitation, and to make love with them was to take of the very food that fed my soul!
I began writing love poems...about all the cities I wandered thru, and all the dawns I christened with champagne and chocolate covered strawberries traced up and down the naked spines of my lovers.
My life was completely mine.

Then one day my sweetened dawns were interrupted by the blunt violence of hate.
I found myself face to face with the reality that someone could actually despise me simply because I dared to love out loud, (apparently there were names and stigmas and repercussions for that!)



To be continued...

Sunday, April 17, 2016

I AM KNOWING
by Khalil Somadi

I am flowing
from my knowing
in color!

Vibrant hues
of Me and Life infused.

Pliant blues
beneath the strife of views
the world is hard bestowing.
I am flowing

still,

knowing

real,

showing

steel
draped with red rose petals!

Tho my haters meddle
in my lines of freedom
while I act like I don't see them,
all I do is flow.
Color their blight with what I know,
until it dims into neutrality
in anything it might have meant to me.

I am knowing I am free.
Realizing in Kaleidoscopistry!

I AM KNOWING 
by Khalil Somadi 

I am flowing 
from my knowing
in color!

Vibrant hues
of Me and Life infused.

Pliant blues
beneath the strife of views
the world is hard bestowing.
I am flowing

still,

knowing 

real,

showing 

steel
draped with red rose petals!

Tho my haters meddle
in my lines of freedom
while I act like I don't see them,
all I do is flow.
Color their blight with what I know,
until it dims into neutrality
in anything it might have meant to me.

I am knowing I am free.
Realizing in Kaleidoscopistry! 

Ase ( or ashe) is an African philosophical concept through which the Yoruba of Nigeria conceive the power to make things happen and produce change. It is given by Olodumare  (Higher Power or Alpha & Omega ( to everything -  ancestors, spirits, humans, animals, plants, rocks, rivers, and voiced words such as songs, prayers, praises, curses, or even everyday conversation!)
 Existence, according to Yoruba thought, is dependent upon it.
In addition to its sacred characteristics, ase also has important social ramifications, reflected in its translation as "power, authority, command."
A person who, through training, experience, and initiation, learns how to use the essential life force of things to willfully effect change is called an alaase. It is something we can all come to be.
Ase is the issuing forth of your will, which, becoming one with energies in the universe that vibrate with your own, set forth action, applying the Law of Attraction.
Your mind, the vibrations of the life force within you, is energy and is powerful. Everything is made of energy,  Kindreds, and energy can be directed.

--K. Somadi--

FINDING US IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT"
by Khalil Somadi

   Let's talk about Change. Change in the form of letting go of  the customs born out of white supremacy that have now become staples in the everyday lives of Black People.  Holding onto customs and traditions that do not benefit our growth is not only a self-depreciating act but thwarts our desire to learn about our own customs, our own culture.
   We owe it to ourselves and to the future generation of Blacks to set out on a quest for truth and pride in our African culture, to learn about it and actually live what we learn rather than remaining immersed in a culture that is not ours, that was in fact forced upon us through psychological assimilation.    
   Your average Black person can tell you all about the white man's customs but not very much about his own beyond what was taught in history  books; and although that is by design, we have the power to change it. But it must be important enough to Us to want to!
   We need remember that the white man HAS no real culture of his own. What he has is a little bit of this and a little bit of that he has stolen and meshed together as a means of decimating OTHER cultures, based on what he desires to TAKE from the peoples who originated those cultures. And then through various methods he declares this hodgepodge as The Culture. What this does is set him up as the status quo that everyone else must aspire to, with no real chance ofcourse of ever truly being embraced.
   Hence Black people and other people of color come to internalize  their own second-class existence as an accepted mindset; and this is the REAL reason why releasing Theirs to recover Own is so scary to most of Us. But we have to love ourselves enough to pursue knowledge about Who We Are, Who We Were Before the oppression of slavery cut our people off from their customs, their culture, even their real names!
   I realize that there are those of Us who don't see any real importance in coming to know any of those things, who feel that what matters is Here and Now. And as long that is the mindset held, We will remain trapped in the complacency which keeps Us second-class citizens in our own mind and feeling obligated to accept What Is as The Way It Is And Has Always Been...
When nothing could be further from the truth!

                       

"SHE'S A HO, SHE'S A HO"
by Khalil Somadi

It seems everyday somewhere online i see brothers quick to call a sister a ho.
If she has more than one lover, she's a ho.  If she dresses provocatively, she's a ho. If she has more than one "baby daddy", she's a ho. If she likes to party til wee hours of the morning,  guess what? She's a ho!
Wow.
Has you ever noticed that men who do those same things are never the ho?
Women aren't suppose to enjoy sex unless it's with one man only. But it's a man's birthright to enjoy all the sex he wants with whomever he wants.
That's a bunch of gorilla shit!
This mindset is as old as dust and just as unoriginal!
Not to mention the obviously overlooked irony that without men to ho with them, there could BE no sisters as hoes!
These brothers fail to realize that the same patriarchal society that label women and especially black women as inferior for being nonconformist, is the same patriarchal society that oppresses black women AND black men with stereotyping and psychological brainwashing based in creating an ideal that is not real, then denigrating them as a People for always perpetually failing to be black by white standards!

Sisters who quickly chime in along with the brothers and often leading the charge in labeling other sisters a ho, should realize that they are helping build and strengthen the proverbial box society has constructed for them, even if they themselves do none of the things perpetuated as ho behavior, just by being black,  female and willing to marginalize their own sisters; because if a patriarchal society pigeonholes one sector of black femininity as immorally inferior based on race, it stereotypes all black femininity as such. And these sisters are most certainly influenced by said stereotype, whether it be by being labeled themselves at some point, or by causing them to bend over backwards to live up to someone else's ideal of what they should or should not be.
If a white supremacist society controls your mindset, it can control your actions, toward your ownself your own people.

We must learn to see with more than our eyes, Kindreds!