E57: The Sankofa Session Feat. Shawn Waddell

Sean Waddell· Guest0:00

Standing in our present, looking back at our past, moving towards our future. Say cool Sound perform While on my first internship in Jacksonville, North Carolina, the closest thing that I got to home was a High Point Furniture down the street. But that still wasn't home because I'm from Greensboro, land where some of the women I went to high school with are pregnant and trying to make working at McDonald's a lifetime accomplishment, and some of the men are hard boys hugging the block and trying harder to hug their pride while being a baby father and jobless, a place where my friends don't remember my birthday and forget how to make me feel special on days where I need it the most, but I'll never ask for it because I'm the hardest man with this pride, but sometimes that isn't enough to get me through the night. My bed is full of dry tears and wet dreams, dreams are gonna morph my pillow into something warm that can hold me like I've never been held because my arms have become too familiar for my broken parts. My journal has become a series of suicide notes never exacted. I started writing because it came too hard to keep these secrets in. The caged boxes on the sheet were my only refuge. I perform these truths dressed in lies so the audience won't see my struggle, so my parents won't see the martyr they've created. They get upset when I don't invite them to my shows, but they wouldn't understand these demons anyway. Y'all, I wrote this poem after days of feeling alone on a crowded street, in a crowded work trailer, in a one-bedroom apartment hoping that I could shatter this pride in hopes that someone would want to