2025
Poet, Proponent
On Systemic Oppression & Liberation Through Art
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Poet, Proponent
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My fists these cuffs my mouth rips this cus
Cuz cousin this is our life's sis y fus
but don't fuss too much
That's why your hands are in the man's
pushing back their demands - their scripture, their doctrine.
They're fucking high commands
Yo, I'll take it to my man's 125th St., Harlem barbershop
the agora still stands
Politican finger lickin' we got a thing for this diction -
but what we face is restriction -
covalent bonds in the hood,
and we share atoms with addiction
Psychoanalytic methodologies come from survival - just living
Not college curated
We have phd's before prison
They say 10,000 hours to Master
But Master - that time in your debt
steals the song from the laughter -
I'd rather put that time into plaster
Like a Robert Lugo mash up
and find myself
A poet,
a proponent of my life
from here on after
Reflection
This spoken word piece confronts the violence of systemic oppression with unflinching honesty. The opening lines—"My fists these cuffs my mouth rips this cus"—collapse the boundary between resistance and constraint, showing how survival itself becomes a form of bondage.
The Harlem barbershop becomes the modern agora, the Greek marketplace where democracy was born. Here, political consciousness isn't learned in universities but forged through lived experience. "We have phd's before prison" inverts the academic hierarchy, recognizing that survival generates its own epistemology—ways of knowing that precede and exceed formal education.
The poem's central turn hinges on the word "Master"—both the achievement of expertise (10,000 hours) and the historical figure who owns time, bodies, debt. This double meaning exposes how the pursuit of mastery itself can replicate structures of enslavement, stealing "the song from the laughter."
Robert Lugo is a ceramic artist who creates classical Greco-Roman pottery featuring contemporary street culture— hip-hop, sneakers, hoodies—challenging who gets immortalized in "high art." The reference to Lugo signals the speaker's choice: to take the time demanded by systems of oppression and redirect it into art that honors their own experience, their own life.
The final declaration—"A poet, a proponent of my life from here on after"—transforms victimhood into agency. Not just a poet (creator) but a proponent (advocate, defender) of their own existence. This is self-actualization born from survival, art born from resistance.