BLACKLIT

Wakefield Brewster (AKA Da Lyrical PitBull) is known as one of Canada’s most powerful professional performance poets.

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I swallow sum blackboard paint
So I can paint da word
Ain't a word
Spitting ink or chalk I still talk

A facts machine paradox proper truth stopper
Can't stop me or mock me 
Europea-emcees can't top me

When a Brother gets a hold of technology
it's microphone wreckology
Dealing with your lame-footing can’t step-upatallogy
I offer no apology

For bovine or swine domesticated equine
For mankind
My own mind

Up and mixed artistic with linguistic
And I slung a hot rock
Like Basquiat
When he brought the black thought

Bleeding paint upon paper
He changed and then deranged
The sight of man the earth shaper
He closed the eye caper
And some years later since my Brother’s life broke

I realize I am a smudge
A perfect brush stroke

With
Pretty colours
Pretty colours

I am orange and yellow and red
I surprised myself when poetically bled

Myself

I was tongue twisted up like a dread
With thoughts that rot sticking up in my head

Thrust back to life like Lazarus
Strife had me strike me a hazardous

Pose

Wide open with wrists and neck exposed
Liquid life trickling in eclectic flows

From my veins
Pure fire
Voodoo rains
Funeral pyre

My heated aspiration to be an element not simply elemental or even instrumental

But a song
And a symphony
With self-pity sympathy

I’m conducting those in the first row who think they know
I make ‘em all play second fiddle
If they don’t jump out the middle

And flee like they were escaping The Passage

Piss shit and vomit on the slavery comet
Founded inspiration in black and broken bones
The songs of the lands that we called our homes

And we can all hear it

Drawn to its timbre like whips to cracks
Licks to backs
Feet to axe

Funny how we stood taller when we lost our toes

And held our heads high
In a regal manner

Defying the yokes

Learning the language to create great stains
Kings and queens now bound in chains
And walking like gods

Unlike the ghosts of our gracious hosts
Now passed on to the land of duppies
Weighted down by the shackles of brutality that they constructed
In the hall of shame
Each one has been inducted

Back to the books
Back to the beginning
Back to the future what we were and what we are
Back in the Black hiding in the back row
Back in the Black like these cats don’t know

Black like my namesake
Black like death row
Black like rum cake
Black like afro
Black like my Tae Kwon Do
Brothers Afro Dojo

Because you can't make
Wake a blank slate
Because on the willing you can’t reap a rape

I take your shots like I be in da Russian system
Off da shoulder wrist strike
To da throat I’m a diss ‘em

And I’mma talk louder
And I’mma walk prouder
I’m leading by design
Because this hour is mine

I leave you with the fever
And your lip catch a slap
From the Onoshobishobi Ingelosi of rap

This here is the evolution
Amoeba to man
Grunts to griots
Slavery to bravery

Cryptic like messages written on rice
Rolled up in blunt papers

And

Burned like our foremothers at the stake
Hung like our forefathers dancing from trees
A painful slow waltz done in black and broken knees

Please
Please
Please

Help me find the method
I talk so much
That my teeth itch
And my hair hurts
Lyrical spurts

I try and I try and I try
You say you want a sensitive man
And then you hate me when I cry

I gotta internalize
And re-energize
And represent

Because you know my words quick clever can never be spent

And in this industry
No Poemcee mediocrity can mess with me

Though it’s not all I’ll be
In this here reality

I’m a flow it cuz y’all know it

Black is Poetry

See?