choice

Consciously and mindfully and fervently I make my choice
To utter a word and ardent verbs with lack absurd behind this voice
This choice to voice my choice mere hoists, my right and droit and still my choice
Rejoice I voice, fear is slain and moist neath our treads and exploits

So this choice I speak of so literally and deliberately
Is to say something others say so easily without thought or think
Or they’ll wait several moons to allege or to speak
As if the passage of time makes it truth or replete

This thing I choose to say I swear I do mean
And daily renew the vow with the signature of a keen
I feel it, I do it, I want it, don’t rue it,
I will remain true to it, tres palabras renew it

Idioms and dialects and tongues can articulate
Luminous yet simple words that linger and still emanate
Out of mouth yet in the mind and heart and being all around
Vexed, perplexed, and second-guessed, its origins still seem unfound
Enveloping the tangible and vanquishing where I once did shrink
Yielding to express my heart while acting on the words I think
Omnipresent beckoning and vertical lines exploit the voice
Unanimous and magnanimous I consciously have made my choice.

kenn bivins (c) 2006

sans kenn (without me)

Reading an old journal entry showed how deeply someone close to me once hurt me. I chuckle at the intensity of some of my words and how I have a more sunny disposition in my writing these days. Enjoy the words of this once-angry-black-man.

Without me, she’s without kenn
Fettered, unfit, and dark within
Going nowhere and hope so slim
Too deep to tread, too vain to swim
The stench of vomit and rusted sin
And dark and dank and bleak and dim
Her dirge plays like unfamiliar hymns
No sing-alongs nor hopeful glims
Without me, no weeds are trimmed
Her moniker lies, her smile still sins
Like windows and mirrors with broken lens
Or brothers and sisters not akin
Or bleeding organs ‘neath swelling skin
The rainfall floods, the speaker is grim
Hope once had, from my grasp she rends
No apologies nor attempted mends
One day she’ll see but until then
Do cry for her for she’s just… sans kenn.

-kB!

meet me in fall

I wrote this not too long ago and recently shared it with a friend. It had been some time since I read it and upon reading it again, it revived the feelings that wrote it… and it is Spring.
———————————————————-

Before autumn and you, all my countenance beheld
Was decay and the podium from whence Hope fell
Stenciled silences and empty faces would pretend,
Lifeless bodies slept ‘neath stoned etchings and then…

I hear you…as an inaudible breeze
Evident by thawing a posthumous freeze
Where once charred birds could no longer fly
I exhale before you as distant lovers sigh
These callouses once protected and fulfilled a need
These callouses now soften, am willing to bleed
To caress, to feel, to sucumb and to reel
To live therefore to heal, to be within your will.

Your will, unchilled embraces of be
Ying
and yang
and you
and me
Balanced…beautifully.

If only you’ll believe
For looking to spring we’ll plant the seed
With you, I shall be freed
Meet me in fall.

Ribbons of orange and red and sky and all
Bereshith, my Love, when we meet this fall.

kenn 2005