Picking Up the pen

Some events in life have a way of moving so quickly, that the mind has little time to register and comprehend what’s going on. That is about the only way I can describe writing and publishing this book. 

A few years ago, I had the idea to create a blog about being a son, husband, father, and black man. I wrote a few blog entries and thought “maybe I could build a book from this.” But after a while, the idea fizzled out. My camera found a way of occupying my time and the idea kind of move to the back of the head. After a while though, I completed a few other writing projects, such as actually publishing a magazine, and the idea slowly started coming back.

So what is this book about?

I couldn’t let go of the idea of writing a book surrounding those topics; however, I quickly realized that I had zero qualifications to write a book on those topics. Sure, I checked all the boxes of being a son, husband, father, and a black man but writing a book as if I had some kind of expert opinion on the those topics would have been wrong and misleading. I had all these mind mapping notes on what the book would be about but they became useless. That is until I noticed, that the notes had a poetic flow to them. Random thoughts that I would have throughout the day started evolving from simple notes to entire stanzas. Next thing I knew, I had 20 poems in a matter of two weeks and over 70 in three months.

What kind of grown man writes poetry?

I asked myself that same question. I always viewed poetry as some kind abstract moody thing that nobody could interpret except the author. I thought it was written by super emotional men or simps who were trying to GTD (fans of the show Martin know what GTD is). Outside a few famous poems, poetry just never interested me. But as more words started to flow randomly across my brain housing group, I realize I could write about my original topics but from a different perspective. And after pouring through tons of poetry books, I realized my archaic biases were just foolish and uneducated. 

However, after reading all those books, I found very few poets who I could relate to. Besides a few musical artist, there were none who wrote about the thoughts of the average man, especially the average middle class black man. So I asked “why not me?” And that is when the preface and overall flow of this book was born.

PREFACE

“What They Will Never Know” is a collection of poems written over the summer of 2020.

Being raised by a dad, two grandfathers and a host of uncles and male role models, I realized that black men tend to bear the weight of the entire world on their shoulders while stoically saying they’re ok. They will internalize everything while taking all of their thoughts, feelings, and emotions to the grave with them. 

Because of this, we will never know how these men dealt with their emotions when it came to common life circumstances such as love, marriage, fatherhood, stress, temptation, friendship, depression, and many others. This leaves their sons with half of a blueprint in which to figure life out with.

Therefore, these poems are written from the perspective of a son making it up as he goes, a son who wishes he could pick his dad’s brain one last time, son who now knows why they take it to the grave.

You don’t see this perspective represented in today’s society let alone written about. Poetry is a female dominated industry (and I think rightfully so because they do it 1,000 times better). The few modern male poets that I came across wrote about love. While there is nothing wrong with that, some of them seemed suspicious, as if they were pandering to a certain market for profit alone. And the handful of other male poets wrote about depression and dark things. While I have had my own battles with depression (and write about them in this book), poetry about suck starting a shotgun was not my thing. So where were the poems from the middle class black men? The kind of guys who have a stable life but hide all the internal struggles they had to go through in order to get that stable life.

So I decided to write about it.

I’m sure this book will shock some people and create a lot of questions in the minds of others. But storytelling should do that. What’s even better is that not all the poems are written from personal experiences. I took some experiences from watching the men in my life who were also stable middle class black men. That means the fun part is watching people play themselves trying to figure out if this suburban, middle class, church boy dad has some skeletons in his closet.