When considering the last blog of 2024 and what I wanted to say, I got stuck. I stopped and started multiple times with each article more uninspiring than the last. When asking myself “why,” a conversation with poet Jamaal Mays came to mind. Jamaal said that writer’s block occurs because their is something else that needs to be written. Metaphorically, we’re backed up like a traffic jam. In order to get things flowing again, you have to address the accident that caused everything to slow down to one lane in the first place. That was this poem. Floating around in the back of my head for months, this angst demanded to be formulated into poetry. While it is not specifically a new years poem or a message for 2025, it is about existing loudly and boldly which is a lesson 2024 has taught me. As always, thank you for reading. Happy New Year!

That bitch said I got secrets in my closet
And says she knows them all.
She sleeping with an old friend who once tried to sleep with me
In anger, he must have told her my secrets.
Cause over night, she went from wanting me and begging me
To thinking she had some shit over me.
Arsenal for her mouth cannon
Amo for her ambition.
I tried to tell her how men do:
He told my secrets to you, who you think he telling your secrets to?
But like girls who in love but ain’t never been loved tend to do,
She flew the coop.
Flapped her wings with anyone who gave her the time.
Grandma say chicken heads be chicken when they hear the crow of a rooster
Bitch might not know…
I crow!
I’m old school southern baptist turned non-denominational
I know how to crow; been crowing in pulpits since I was old enough to talk
Formula: Testify!
Admit your sins and how cool you kinda is!
Then pick a scripture that condemns that shit.
End with a telling of how good God is.
Formula like secret sauce
like proprietary blend
like mystic concoction.
There is an esoteric recipe for this kind of carrying on.
I learned it the day God wrote my story into the margins
That when a man is tryna fuck you over, you fuck him back
Use your womanly wilds to entice him into looking the other way
and then cut off his locs; watch him pull the temple down for you anyway
He thinks his sins will be swept under rug or pushed into closet
But I
Being both gansta and griot
Write his story into my margins
Publish the Ecclesiastical Chronicles
And give him a line or few:
My depression dressed in a cheap wool hat and tattered leather vest found me
And I, being a woman both battered and bearing, taught him things he couldn’t conceptualize
Like how his god both wasn’t real but in his bed at the same time.
My closet is a walk in, the one with all the secrets
the one she said was packed so tight that if she pulled one tendon
I, like flesh and blood, would come spilling out
That you would cancel me
Strip me of my honorary degrees
cancel my walk at the Met Gala
remove my star from the Hollywood walk of fame
You would see me and think: That’s the bitch with the secrets packed all tight in her mausoleum
Secrets she told a friend who told a girlfriend who told the world in hopes of burning me
BURN ME BITCH!
I tattooed the words under my left breast
I said via DM one night,
an olive branch turned oily
She checks his phone for proof she ain’t pretty enough
I had warned her of that
She decides when he be man and when he be bitch
I warned him of that too
As black women do for black men who we bosom for comfort
And let suckle for nourishment
Only to find that milk be the damn thing they leave for and never come back.
He told her all my secrets
Made her think she could destroy me with what she knows.
But me, being both poet and pimp
For lack of better words
Have been spilling my secrets all my got damn life
Those are not skeletons in my closet
Those be works of art, coat racks for my guest to hang hats on and bras on
Bitch, it’s not the skeletons you need to be worried about anyway
Those you see have been gutted, skinned, and put on display
See my fucking skeletons on the cover of books and published on .coms
See my skeletons like jewelry dangling from my ears
I’m proud of these secrets that I lay bare for all to see.
No, it’s not the skeletons you need to worry about, bitch
But it’s where I bury the bodies
The one’s still alive and kicking
That should make you back the fuck away from me
I didn’t tell nobody about those
And you don’t want to be the one to find out.