Poetry

Poetry is boundless. Most people think of sonnets or limericks when they think of poetry. I think of hip-hop, not rap, but hip-hop. This is a culture that embodies poetry to a tee. It gets to be a sensory overload bloated with emotion and musicality. The food, the music, the crew, the family, the history, and the potential for greatness all make it something worth living for. It allows me to say: what I want, how I want, if I want. It allows me to yell, “Fuck the police!” without a worry or doubt. It empowers me. 

I first started to write to impress a girl. She was a singer and I was into hip-hop. At the time I was listening to rappers like Common, Mos Def, Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, and other conscious rappers. This kind of rap caught my ear and my brain. So I wrote a few rhymes on my iPod’s note app and then started posting on Facebook. I didn’t get much feedback. This didn’t matter because I didn’t give a single fuck about feedback, I still don’t. I wrote about girls and how tight I could rhyme. Typical shit but I found my own flavour. I developed overtime, listening to hip-hop evolve as I did. New artists, new beats, new genres, and new content constantly flooded my attention. Throughout high-school I became more and more frustrated. The source of the frustration is irrelevant, but writing became a channel for my frustration and I can’t think of any better way. Now, I don’t write everyday, but I’m always observing. I write about my life and what I see around me. I like to tell a story and I like to pick your brain. This makes rapping easy. What makes it difficult is my fear of being misunderstood, like many rappers of my time and before. Not that I give a shit, I just don’t like being misunderstood. Everyone cares at least a little bit about what people think. The beauty of hip-hop is that I can be as contradicting as I want, because speaking my mind comes before speaking my logic. Hip-hop changed me, for better or worse.

I’m not trying to define or hip-hop, don’t get it twisted. I’m just sharing my interpretation, and the story behind it.