njabulo n.

I CAN’T BREATHE

I can’t breathe,

I’m running out of breath.

My heart is heavy, I’m sinking in pain,

I’m so hurt and I cannot help it at all.

I’m running out of time, I feel lost,

With my mind taken elsewhere, I can’t think straight.

I’m tired of everything in this universe,

I’m tired of everything being made a racial issue,

I’m tired of black being made a personality trait.

It is just a matter of skin as the blood we bleed is the same, Why let that rule your mind, engulf everything in your brain and eyesight?

I can’t breathe,

How can you be so proud that you are taking other races down? We haven’t changed a bit for a better future to elevate ourselves. Instead of helping each other rise and be triumphant unitedly, They break us in every way till we fall and they celebrate, Celebrate while love and life is lost,

While our ego and self-esteem is broken into pieces like broken glass. I know they say, ignorance is bliss and I say ignorance kills, Because it is the black heart they fear,

I’m unapologetically black and I’m proud of my melanin black skin, That’s why I’m blessed, blessed to never forget of what you did, You did me wrong, enslaved me, robbed me my roots and treated me like an ox, I can’t forget that you made me feel ashamed of my own skin, Asking the creator absurd questions like why he made me a black child.

Well, I cannot change the color of my skin, like I can change yours, My hurting heart can bury your shame.

Racism is not what is being educated, demonstrated or bring televised, It is the hate you have in your head and heart towards other races, Racism is a turmoil affecting the whole universe at large.

Why one must suffer, get murdered because of his skin color? Racist people have succeeded in blinding the mankind.

I can’t breathe,

I can’t breathe, you’re hurting me, and I can feel my whole body trembling. We all know that governments cannot heal the wounds,

Between blacks and whites for they always bring racism into the equation. They know that the moment they put it off,

Like a candlelight or bulb light being switched off,

And the whole room being dominated by thick darkness,

So be their power, it would be the end of it.

When a black child cries, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,

When we cry foul, they act as if no one hears or speaks. We hope that racists get jailed and sentenced,

That the perpetrators get their well-deserved evil ransom, Since racial explosives are more toxic than grenades and bullets. This is a demon, wicked to fight peace and love in this universe, But still, my heart hurts and I can’t breathe,

Your knee on my neck feels like a hangman’s noose,

Taking my life as it strangles me, squeezing my neck.

I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,

What you are doing to me is homicide, why execute me like this? As if I’ve murdered a saint in a church on a Sunday.

But when a white person kills someone,

He doesn’t get beat up, with his head pressed against the road concrete, Handcuffed and not given an ear when he begs for his own life. My heart bleeds and it is hard for me to forgive,

I’m screaming blue murder, it’s been long since we started, With this bone of contention.

#Actagainstracism

#blacklivesmatter

#blackandproud

Njabulo Nkambule is a writer, musician, University student and a poet hailing from the Kingdom of Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland). They are also an author of the soon to be published anthology “POETRY UNIVERSE” which will include mainly written poems. Recently, they dropped a spoken word poetry project titled DEEPLY ROOTED WORDS TO THE UNIVERSE where they were reciting their poems. They are a devoted, hardworking poet with a keen eye for detail and an insatiable interest in the use of the written word. They are one person who is so passionate about poetry and have many written poems under their name (not yet published). Reading and coming up with new ideas is what keeps them going, they simply construct new worlds and words just to come with a new, beautiful and unique poem so that it can touch masses of the readers out there, helping them to relate. On their poems they include quite a number of
poetic forms including rhymed poetry, narrative poetry, pastoral poetry, elegies, limerick poetry, lyric and soliloquy poetry. Their poems involve a lot of emotions since they range from death poems up to death poems to help the local readers to relate on what they write about. With their versatility, they make sure that through my poems, people get healed instead of getting killed because they believe that words can either kill or heal a soul. Writing lyrics of hip hop (rap) music and their society inspired them to write poems. They breathe it, they consume it and through the word of poetry and through its own
world is where they find peace to connect with the unseen.

Readers and poetry lovers can get in touch with them or access their poems, music and spoken word poetry on the link below.
https://linktr.ee/dabluekiddie
https://booknet.com/en/book/march-28th-b281765