Requiem For a Soul Singer
Whitney is gone
Everybody assumes but no one knows
I just would say she is no more
To sing the love of self so sweetly
So richly
So full of natural delicacy
You could almost believe
We know who we are
Almost believe we are healed
But I knew that when a soul
Brings a song from such a depth
It is not for expression alone
It cannot be
For there is nothing yet to express
While we still search for who we are
So Whitney left us
In so much sorrow and sadness
Gone without finding it
Gone without knowing it
Her search was a melody come to an end
Whitney is gone,
And no one crying now was ever her friend.
All Whitney had was her fame
Her voice was a sort of wealth that could give her anything
It got cracked too
Dumped her in a bag of blues
And could not even sing the not for pain again.
When it happens like that
You just want more of the anesthesia
You just do not want to know the difference
Between day and night
Or black and white
For there is no hossanah left in that color line
They do not care that you are dying
Seem not to understand
For all their demand and their love is about self
We are not predators
We have no power to fight the living to its death
We make our living off the dead
That is what we have been marginalized to become
Since the ships sail away from the soul
What we are, since we were torn up and uprooted
And lost our roots and family
You would think our preachers would find some language
To connnect us again,
Instead we watch myysteriouusly the silence
Of Whitney passing
Into the night, while that jive choir remain
And Africa bleached from their brain
That is the beginning of ouur death
It is how Michael Jackson, Bob Marley
And those who sang without a name
It is how we are all dying in, like we are
Invisible, crawling in the filth of his-story
O no, not me
I want Whitney to sing the way brother Tupac did
He died like a soldier, hating it to the end
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