Greyson Koch

we’ve been reduced to jaded lines, all softness eroded. the tools we we would use to fight this persistent culling of personhood have been stripped from us. back home, the tribe’s poet had more power and respect than even the clan chief. mayors and political advisors like my grandfather shared their titles with men and women twice their age who had never had any ‘formal’ schooling but who still knew more than the council did. they were responsible for swaying the heart, for bearing testimony to their people all because they were keepers of history and poetry.

There are films I know more intimately than I have some of my lovers. If you did into the center of me, I am convinced that it will not be muscle but flesh that you’ll find but instead, the second half of baldwin’s another country. if i slit my wrists, know that the gabaay- the poetry - of my people might come streaming down my arms

“Courage. As long as we got the courage to get out of this town and never look back, we’ll be okay.” A girl named Olive said that to me once, and then I never saw her again.

If I were old, I would say the secret is this: Don’t dwell on the dream too long. Don’t dwell on what you don’t have. Dwell on what you have and take action towards what you don’t.