They Told Me I Would Be Nothing

They told me I would amount to nothing. They told me to never speak of success or Harvard PH.D.s. They told me I was under represented because my high school would have no black teachers on the faculty. So they told me to look up to them. They told me to forget my existence, my beliefs, my qualities that I embody, and to leave my head empty so they could cram in their knowledge. They shove text books in my face and then tell me I have to pay 100,00 dollars for college, when they know damn well I don’t have that kind of money. And if I were a woman, I would strip to pay my tuition, but I don’t have the proper body parts men drool over, I am only a man. So after you’ve took all of me what part of me do I have left. I have scratched and scraped this world for a piece of myself and I came up empty. I feel as if your trying to pimp me, as if im just a number, a 9 digit 2 dashed government assigned label. And I will speak this until you prove to me otherwise. And im not faulting any individual for I know its as collective as rain drops on window panes. Or my parents addictions on my childhood pains, so my family or society, who do I blame? No one.
I thank god, and stay grounded in my faith. And I thank. I thank him for blessing me with the gift of gab, to open these lips and speak words that paint pictures. They paint over cold inner city concrete, and paint on aristocratic mansions, they paint the color of my tongue, red, on all creations of man. And my color of passion becomes the 9th wonder of the world. I thank god for giving me this brush. Thank him for giving me the gift of making my old ancestors blush because I am half white, a part of me is. And yes, I am half black, a part of me lives. Ive been constructed from the same fibers of lynching ropes, and they make up the roughness of my palms. But I found it weird that if I blame whites, I blame half of me for doing the other half wrong. But they told me all of me was. They told me I would amount to nothing.