Poetry

All poems are the original work of myself, Joe Davis. Yet, as a creator, I know that my creativity, or ability to create, is freely received from The Creator and I, in kind, give my creative expression freely to you. I don’t hesitate to share my work with others, but please respect my gift–which simply means I’d appreciate it if you used honesty when sharing my work elsewhere. Just ask me first and it’s all good!

“True Soul”

Listen.

Listen close.

Not just with your ears.

Listen with your souls.

This is not to make your Hips Hop, not to Rock and Roll you.

This is to turn the Blue Rhythms of your Soul into red hot coals burning with smoldering passion!

This is the last earth-shattering explosion that rose engulfing ashes,

Carving everlasting love and hope where they are absent!

This massive wind crashes against the gaps and miraculously closes them,

Mending these moments to the way back when—

Back then when life was the way it was suppose to have been.

With one voice we shall rejoice in harmonious happiness when this alas happens,

But it only happens if

You listen.

Listen to our songs, poems, poemsongs, neo-psalms

Like alms to the poor in spirit for those who hear it.

Our lungs fill and spill forth breathes of gospel like imitable windmills

Challenging our throat with each note balancing on a tight rope between

Words spoke and those we wrote in old bound notebooks.

Once we lift our voices and sing we bring freedom to each kingdom enslaved on the page,

The curse is broken, the womb is open, and a newborn hope floats across finely-tuned airwaves

To finally seek refuge in your ear canal.

Can you hear it know?

Listen to our medicinal sentiments sent through a syringe pressed deep within your soul.

Are you listening?

We don’t need synthesized beats

Our words are instrumental!

They hit your mental, paint a picture, and integrate the pixels

To stick to you with each syllable!

And so

We make these words in our heads and in our hearts

And hand them to you

Which is where it starts…

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“Pangea”

In the beginning we…
Were one:
One heart
One soul
One being
And as one we would sing of one thing:
The beauty of unity, communion between you and me—
Each day we knew this truth anew,
Our spirit flew fluidly and free in the breeze,
Swimming with ease through golden grass and green leaves—
All was well until we fell
In deep sleep,
Where the stronghold of our soul’s love and peace was once breached.

Pangea.

Arise and wake up
Movers and shakers,
It’s high time we move up and shake up
The ruins that lay dust,
Let us shape up the void that formed nakedness,
Let us take inexistence and create relationships,
For earthquakes of hatred break up our genetic make-up,
It was these faults that first stripped us apart,
Finding faults that shifted, like rifts in the dark,
Rippling waves sharp as blades that ripped at the heart,
As the soul and the body lay twisted and scarred.

Pangea.

Yet hope lives on in a new song,
The rising sun of a new dawn,
The sewer’s seeds grew strong
Afresh with morning dew on outstretched branches
Like two arms opened, awaiting the embrace of another:
Father, mother, sister, brother, friend, lover,
All in one,
Jubilant music calling all to come
To help one
Connect one to the next one
Each one reach one until we be-
Come unity
One community
You and me:
Seated at the communion feast
Free to dance and sing
Hand in hand under God’s canopy
Free to love
Free to be loved
Free to be free
Because
Everyone is Love
If you love everyone:
Love is one Love is all:
One Love covers a multitude of faults:
Pangea.

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“i Am”

Contrary to popular belief

i am not popular belief.

i am not Pop, Blues, Jazz, or Soul.

i am not Hip Hop.

i am not Rock and Roll.

i am not Music.

i am beyond the genres.

i do not choose to exist in the squished views you invent.

i am not a rapper,

i am a poet:

i am a tree

i am a poet tree–

Who only wants to plant more seeds.

i am a warrior on his knees,

Though i am not fallen,

i am risen.

i am a Christian

Standing on more than religion

But a relationship beyond -ologies and -isms.

i am one who believes in things unseen.

i am one of many who cries, sweats, and bleeds

Seeking to be set free and free indeed

i am a humble servant of the I am that I am.

i am worship.

i am spirit.

i am truth.

Yet i am but a man.

i am no more than a boy with a dream,

Or so i deem

For as a man thinks in his heart so is he.

i am a lover and a fighter because i fight for love.

i am dust, bones, and blood.

i am not who I was

Though i am still me

Becoming who i will be

Even if it kills me.

i am a martyr,

i fight a war,

i live and die in my art form:

A life sacrifice to impart more

Of my soul’s truth and beauty

Outpoured unto you through me

That you may know a new love, a new peace

Until you too sing:

i am.

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“Love Always”

I love you.

I love you at your best, I love you at your worst,

Love you in a dress, or sweatpants and T-shirt.

I love you when you stay in shape, I love you when you gain weight,

I love everything about you that you love and even everything you say you hate!

I love you.

I love you when you wake up, I love you without make up, I love you any time of day in any way because

I mean it when I say love!

I love you.

I love you from start to finish, from head to toe,

I love your every spot, wrinkle, and blemish,

every freckle and mole,

I love both your dimples and your pimples,

your mind, body, spirit, and soul,

I will love you before and after the here and now

and now I’m here to let you know

I love you.

I love the way you laugh, you smile, you talk, you walk, you sing–

I could cut this poem in half and say I love your everything.

Because if you ever think that you’re not loved

that just isn’t so–

no matter what, my love for you is unconditional.

I will love you forever and a day

and today is the day I will forever say

I will love you just the same when your hair turns dusty grays

I will love you just because I love you:

always.

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“Revolution:  NOW”

I don’t know about you, but

I think we need a Revolution

I can sense it moving,

A cleansing rain I can feel run beneath my skin,

A fire on my tongue waging war within the wind,

The pulsating pain of passion pushing to begin

A revolution of revolutions: NOW

Not fantasized and not televised

No petition to politicians, scandalized,

Not government administered, but

Of Mothers and Ministers,

Dr. Kings, Mahatma Gandhis, and Mother Teresas,

Pieces within each of us, warriors before us:  NOW

Echoes of the past historic torches

Passing a revolution, not passive but radical

Rhetorical or oratorical, all or one but

Only if it’s called: NOW

It all comes down to how there’s been

A drastic lack of impacting actions and words

And their vacancies we place complacency

Deceived and confused we fuse to a spewing lukewarm normalcy,

A dominant dormancy, an inborn weakness that keeps us asleep

Our hardened hearts have forgotten how to bleed

With the deep-seated seeds of pain,

As our vains clot with clockwork, the tedious tick-tocking

Blotting out the hurt and howling

Our deafened ears deaden the hunger pangs of starvation

The whimpering, withering cries for salvation

Our eyes shrivel with dimness

Silently witnessing darkness sweeping over

Acidic hours devouring our young

Slumbering in dangerous times, these last and evil days,

Whilst God’s children ease in Zion, the devil plays

Like a lion lying in wait for his prey,

A savage scavenger salivating with ravenous cravings

Waiting, waiting , waiting…

And yet,

We wait too

We wait for help (and do nothing)

We wait for hope (and do noting)

We wait for healing (and do nothing)

The wait of this world is holding us down

You can’t wait until the perfect opportunity,

It may never be the right time—

The ever-right time is: NOW

Howe long must we ask how long?

When will we grow tired of being tired?

When will we grow sick of being sick?

I’m discomfited with how comfortable we have become in conforming with sin

We don’t need a slow process with no progress,

Such apathy leads to atrophy,

We live and die unhappily,

This is not the way it has to be

We aptly need

Exceeding expediency,

Eminent immediacy,

Emerging Urgency

Urging emergency

Cardiac surgery on the world to be free: NOW

And thus we must

Shake off the dust from our well-weary feet,

Awake from the dead of our dream-dreary sleep

NOW is the time and place for us to change the time and place,

Change, change, change the pace,

These enslaving chains will break only if we hasten in faith: NOW

Awake, awe ache, a wake,

Endowing power to the people who,

With each outreaching scream, lead

Actions and words to be on equal frequencies

This moment with us becomes momentous,

When will these moments be mended?

It’s a movement

We were meant to move,

That’s without question,

But are we moving in the right direction?

In a world where

People don’t know, don’t care

Don’t know if they care, don’t care if they know,

It doesn’t matter what you said you believed or believed you said

Because faith without works is dead

Rather than wailing and whining we work instead,

Sacrificing a feast of hearts that someone may be fed

Woe unto those on the slippery slopes,

Slothful and slow, in an idle daze, lazy and lackadaisical,

Let’s take it back to the days of old,

Longing for an age of gold, when saints prayed to saved souls

Oh, let the song of my tongue summon all tribes, old and young,

Stretching far and wide, a war drum cry like en-lightening  thunder

Electrifying the spines of old dry bones

A rise, our eyes, arise

Children mighty and bold,

Heightening upon a wingless ascension

To fight and atone

Decades of descendants’ decadent distending,

The disintegration of a dispassionate nation,

Generation of degeneration engendering hatred,

Moving onward with one word: LOVE

We won’t settle or calm down until Heaven comes down,

As trumpets sound to announce a revolution: NOW

If only I can affect one with true affection

And tell a dying world that there’s a resurrection.

We will be the change that we want to see,

From rolling rivers, mighty mountains, seas to shining seas.

We shall make the earth tremble, rocking the leaves off the trees.

We shall sing a new song, with hearts pure and mind true.

I am ready for the Revolution, but are you?

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“Everybody Needs a Home”

If home is where the heart is

then a poem is a home for the artist:

and art is part of the heart

and heart has hear in it and hear has ear in it,

so let all those with ears to hear listen to this art with your heart…

We’ve all been homeless.

At least once as the least of these, lowly and lonely,

wildly roaming over the earth and seas in search of hope,

yes of the flesh, but more of the soulful being.

Our highest hope is in the Most High, easily within our reach.

Yet we don’t try to stretch and strive the full stride of our feet.

And our hands are wide and strong enough to touch each and every need,

yet they dry and crack under the weight of such a heavy greed,

growing fat and swollen upon the sullen feebleness we feed,

as those below, the barren and broken, begin to cry and bleed.

These groans for a home are now homegrown,

we’ve become deaf, blind, and dumb,

as we finally succumb to the abandonment of our own,

the most painful kind of numb.

If you don’t think they’re starving, you’re fooling yourself.

If you’ve never been hungry, you’re full of yourself.

If we are all beggars, then who is to help?

Such homelessness has become the truest of hells.

Lost in the streets, the worldly wilderness, with nowhere else to go.

Not always junkies and drunkards as is likely to suppose.

More so orphan and widows, praying to be fed and clothed,

yes, with bread and raiment, but even more with the Holy Ghost.

Even God Himself was homeless as He walked among this place.

Would we tend to His nakedness if we were to see His face?

When will the millions of poor children be more familiar and less estranged?

As one man’s cardboard banner read, “Keep your coins. I want change.”