Sounds of a Superhero

Can you hear that?

“Around the way you’re like a neighborhood jewel.  All the homeboys sweat you so you’re crazy-cool.” 

Sounds like my SUPERWOMAN.

Flawless as the quality of a Stevie Wonder piano scale

Unbreakable like Ms. Keys

She’s harmonious as A-minor

Able to exceed the need for Al Green’s, Love and Happiness

She is the heart that beats like a ?uestlove drum solo

Look, it’s a guitar, it’s a drumstick, nah, its MUSIC.

By day, MUSIC makes memories

She can be life’s timetable

MUSIC gives us opportunities to grow

Helping us get to know others as well as ourselves

MUSIC can be peace, offering neutral ground where battles are forbidden

MUSIC holds love in spades when hate is brewing on the horizon

She bleeds tranquility in the midst of chaos, ignorance and envy

MUSIC offers redemption when society chooses to condemn.

By night, she is the soundtrack for the peaks and valleys of my being

She familiarizes me with the success and failures of a Mann on the come-up

MUSIC is the SUPER AROUND THE WAY GIRL

Basement parties, the Goody Shop, or

Just going in the store to purchase Mom’s pantyhose when my masculinity wouldn’t allow me to do so.

Her image remained close when I moved far away

Her voice is rhythmic

Her actions are certified platinum

Her passion has been the microphone for the transmission of my expressions

Without MUSIC, what would life be?

She is a cornerstone in the construction of me becoming a better Mann.

She engineers the sound of my melodies to the Masses

Her existence is a gift to many

The efforts of MUSIC are amplified through speakers that reach those in need of that 1^st dance, to shake off the butterflies and really get their party started.

When she’s ringing through my headphones, her sound not only encourages me to produce hits for the Masses,

She reminds me to never stop singing the song of FREEDOM.

“She likes to dance to the rap jams.  She’s sweet as brown sugar with the candied yams.”

I love MUSIC

My around the way SUPERHERO.

Copyright © 2016 by Leroy Elwood Mann

Waves of Trauma: No Justice…No Peace

Editor's Note: I feel the need to explain the gap in the postings to Word to the Masses (W2TM).  Let me start by saying that Leroy is fine and writing as much as ever. As his editor for W2TM, I take great care in making sure his expression is representative of the Mann I know.  

A crisis in my own life has prevented me from performing my duties consistently over the past year. As things take a turn for the better, my focus can now return to W2TM.  Leroy appreciates your continued support and looks forward to sharing his literary expression with you for the foreseeable future.  Rochelle

This is dedicated to Ms. M. NourbeSe Phillip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._NourbeSe_Philip ) the author of ZONG!

Capital punishment is the tumultuous waters surrounding my being.  It seems the soul of a Mann is suited to sail the swells of where I don’t belong; like a ZONG!

Holding precious cargo, water wherever my eyes go.  Waves of destruction, currents of extinguishment.  Lives enveloped by seas of greed.  Various cultures and tongues trapped and bereaved.

* Evidence is sustenance

                   is support

                   is the law

  the ship is the captain

                is the crew

  perils is the trial

            is the rains

            is the seas

            is the currents

  the case

               is

                    murder * (ZONG! #24)

ZONG! Is bubbles under water

ZONG! Is literary rock climbing.

ZONG! Is the blueprint of watery skies, within the eyes of one forced to swallow their demise.  The soul never dies.

Drown me in your corruption and my voice grows louder as it rises beyond the surface of insidious mental entrapment.  Once suffocated by your law, my legacy now levitates above you all.  The wave of contempt crashing against my physical existence stings my flesh but strengthens the tendons and bones of perpetuated literary expression.

The Who? Where? Was…

The It, When? How?

What have I become?

ZONG! Is my parallel experience.

ZONG! Is a story that must be absorbed because it can’t be told.

Like a building burning with children screaming at the tops of their lungs.  Voices rising within the flames, leaving behind burnt flesh without names.

The 60-plus homes incinerated.  The city’s fraudulent response to restore what was lost.

Is this ZONG!?

Or is this the concrete coffin encapsulating my memories?

It is frustration.  It is chaos. It is the cacophonous eruption of voices impeded by violence.  Where is the justice?  Why is there no peace?  

I can only sing a song with the Earth, Wind and Fire cascading my desires, for freedom, racial equality, and the reparations for the men thrown overboard – into the abyss of a death chamber – as I stood on deck and did nothing but remember.

Who is this that proclaims my life ends on a particular day?  My hour is unknown to man if it is in THE CREATOR’S plan, my exhumation from the depths of reproof is already at hand.

Still Livin,’

MannofStat

Copyright © 2015, by Leroy Elwood Mann

The Gift

This has been a year where the golden rants from my soul were not exclusive to my W2TM audience. Your support has been phenomenal, but here is the other side of my expressions appearing on your screens:

On 12/18/14, Lynden Harris and her Hidden Voices team shared an incredible holiday meal with us; string beans sautéed in a mouth-watering sauce, sweet potato and egg plant pies, turkey, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and dark chocolate that was so hard it had to be cut with a knife.  Word is bond.

Lynden gave each of us gift-wrapped writing paper and ink pens.  Needless to say, these gifts didn’t last long.  I went through the paper before spring was in the air, and I am writing this entry with a state-issued BiC.  Real talk.

It felt good to sit at a table eating with a fork and knife while taking my time and engaging in some wholesome conversations with good people.

We began the New Year with a project in which we created individual life maps.  My map resembles a Monopoly board.  I call it Concrete Exposure – a hard life.  This exhibit – along with copies of our Lethal Injection magazine – were featured at the Re-visioning Justice Conference, at Vanderbilt University this past April.  It was monumental!

Our exhibits were a hit, and caught the eye of a top tier criminal defense attorney named Bryan Stevenson.  In hindsight, I can clearly see it was inevitable for he and I to share the same space.  Feel me?

My Born Day (7/22/15) was simply incredible.  I hailed victorious at our inaugural Story Slam.  I performed a piece called, Between the Lines.  Telling a story about my teenage ambition to win my first trophy caught the ears and eyes of accomplished writer/novelist, Allan Gurganus, another golden moment where my soul was freed from bondage.  Ya heard?

On 8/17/15, I met Bryan Stevenson.  I stood before him and performed one of the most powerful pieces I have ever written.  The experience was surreal.  I stumbled over my words in the first stanza, but Reverend Ann Beck preached a sermon the day before titled, “Redo.” And that is exactly what I did.  

It felt like I fumbled the ball at my own first yard line; recovered it; then ran the distance of 99 yards to “pay dirt.” Everyone was screaming, touchdown!!  Afterwards, Bryan Stevenson autographed a copy of his book, Just Mercy, for me:

“To Leroy,

With respect, appreciation and hope for justice.  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Hold on!

Bryan Stevenson”

This holiday season is already something special for me.  The fall session began with six students from Duke University being added to my creative writing Fam.  We have been reading and discussing the literary works of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright and M. Nourbese Philip.  

We are a circle of friends defying the odds.  Chris, Caleb, Megan, David, Zack and Mike bring a presence to our class that is a gift wrapped in words.  Asante Sana my friends!

By the time this goes to press, six death row prisoners (Team FFLOW) will share their lives in a play called, Serving Life.  It is an incredible way to close out a life-changing year.  I’ll tell you all about it in 2016.  Happy Holidays!

One,

MannofStat

Copyright © 2015 by Leroy Elwood Mann

Misplaced Anatomy

“Racism is a visceral experience that dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.  You must never look away from this.  

You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, that graphs, the charts, the regressions all land with great violence, upon the body.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates 

New York Times bestselling author

This is my block.  That is my seat.  Here is my assigned area to do this or that.  This type of dialogue in a penitentiary setting is the repetitive torture of being dead and alive to know it.  A mind without a body, a fighting spirit with no host to influence.

Some days I wonder why exercising is even on my agenda: push-ups, leg lifts, and running the stairs.  For what?  To maintain a physique that belongs to someone other than myself?  The paradox of losing my body is a psychological monster.  

The arrest warrant reveals that my body was snatched on a cold December evening in 1995. But a deep introspection from a death row prison cell 20 years later, leads me to believe that my body was lost long before the date on the state’s document of ownership.

I spent my most formative years “reppin” Poplar Street.  The violence that was played out up and down Poplar Street felt like a natural existence as long as I kept waking up.  My home girl, Eleanora Fagan (Billy Holiday) once exhaled the truth in a song called, “Strange Fruit.” 

She spoke of black bodies staining the leaves of Poplar trees.  And here I am, claiming ownership of a street that bore the name of the same tree, which showcased the decimation, brutalization and humiliation of black lives that mattered.

At that time, North Philly was the only world that mattered.  For the longest it was all I thought I needed to know.  

I guess it’s because I was ripe fruit rolling through those streets, a body that was lost. Simply put; I was fruit for crows to pluck, except these scavengers made bodies fly with gats and batons.

These were crows that would impede the progression of an ice cream truck to do bodily harm to its driver.  Birds of prey that peck away at the psyche of a ten-year-old African American boy forcibly placed in a jail cell beneath a sold out stadium. 

This same body survived long enough to seek refuge in the U.S. Navy.  An anatomy suited for the concrete and asphalt foundations of urban America, grew “sea legs” as a means of navigating the mood swings of the Pacific Ocean.  While on dry land, it desecrated itself with alcohol, marijuana and countless twirls with heterosexual relations.

Yeah, my body was lost long before it was destined to succumb to a syringe filled with poison; “great violence” upon a body that hasn’t been mine for quite some time.  Every day gets more painful living without a body.  

The memories of what was, can only keep you pain-free for so long. Therefore, this throng of lost bodies – the body of death row – has become a surrogate anatomy, in which my mind can flourish and my soul can be nourished with the small increments of compassion.

This is the truth of a walking corpse becoming a life-changing experience – standing between the world and me.  I am no longer lost, only misplaced.  I have found who I was meant to be.

100,

MannofStat

Copyright © 2015 by Leroy Elwood Mann