Poetry By Norman Williams

 The State of California Vs. Norman Williams
By Norman Williams

The State of California
Vs
Norman Williams.
In court stand accused,
in chains stand to lose
freedom, my freedom.

Like a slave on black Friday,
the profiteer persecuting attorney,
and the auctioneering executioner Judge,
swaying on behalf of the State,
Government; the people.

Stand ready to sold me – the institution
that pay the Judge salary, agreement.
To be an unbiased evaluator,
Weighs the evidential fiction
Like a factual evaluator.

This gatekeeper of opinion.
Opinion unfavorable to my black skin.
On a premise of a compact,
with the public pretender – false defender.
This co-conspirator, represents the same
implicit dominion.

As the Judge auctioneer,
the executioner, and
the profiteer prosecuting attorney
who sold me to the slave keeper (CDCR),
for the highest bidder.
While the public, a body of people,
juries, upper class Caucasian,
play the role of my peers.

Guilty!
Guilty for being black,
guilty for my hated skin color.
Now, Norman Williams, you are
sentenced to death (LWOP), by
prolongation of incarceration.

Her Mahogany Garden
By Norman Williams

In her mahogany garden,
she is moderately durable.
And like blackberry, she is
sweet and juicy.

Flowery in her pleasantry,
the best of everything.
Something pleasant in her
essence and
something sweet, sometimes both.

Like a seed she plants normalcy,
and she blossoms the best cross-
section of African daisy and
African violet.
That musk fragrance.
Her mahogany garden scented
in flowery, sweet raspberry and
uniquely mahogany.

With a rapt mind and extended
tongue, like a hummingbird,
ready to bask in my desire and
quench my craving
in her serene smile-nectarine.
And then falls asleep in her garden.

Hope
By Norman Williams

Did you hear it fall from my chest?
Falling from the stratus of my heart!
Ardently and silently falling
on the floor – ricocheting off.

The unrecoverable. Did you not hear.
Did you not hear it splinter into
many pieces of whimpers and shivering?
Emotions broken and spread out all over
and around me. Like a man drowning.

And gasping to breathe. Stretching out
his hands for hope and catch
nothing instead.

Is one piece of shattered hopes enough
to make hope whole again?
Can paralyzed hope walk upright again?

Is freedom delay fittingly hopeful? Or
is pallid reform and rehabilitation amiss? Or
did I hear hope saying hope against hope,
without any expectation of hope.

143 – Arithmetic
By Norman Williams

The distance
between one and four
are three.
Subtracting one from four
leaves three all alone.
The sum of one plus three
are four.
Take away the right
of one – to add
to the comfort of three
will isolate
the value that four seek.

Slashing three from four
will close the door
on one chance to become
greater than
oneself.
One times four are four
but if you take away
three from four,
you will leave one
unfulfilled.

Damask Rose Garden
By Norman Williams

She entered the dark room of my chasm,
like the moonlight affinity soft.
She effulgence and effectively seep
deep in my soul, and then crawl through
my head space and breathe sweet mellow
tree song, that translates the chanting
melodies of amorous.

She lurk around my heart space, and left
my heart racing, as my mind tracing and
my thoughts chasing her image, and
my sight fixating on her dimples.
It compliments her picturesque smile,
that decorated her Damask Garden looks,
is her Damask Rose Garden.

Her tenderness collides with the depth
of my darkness, that loneliness
promise restless dreams and
steep trail – less climb tomorrow.
Where hope died somewhere.

Under the undertow of her smiles,
sprout the fluorescent of aspiration.
She reveals her interior beauty,
that connected her exterior beauty,
to inspire and awaken my dormant emotions.

She is exclusively unique and
matchless in eloquence.
Her irresistible enchanting
Damask Rose Garden bloom her dimples smiles.
That left me leaking words, and dripping
thoughts and spilling emotions.

I’m tripping and falling painlessly hard,
head over heels in her Damask Garden.
My hardened spirit softens in between
her smile, her truth and genuineness.
Now, I take up residency in her fountain
of elusive rareness.

A Letter to My Six Year-Old Self
By Norman Williams

Dear Young Norman,

This letter I’m about to write to you is personal and is one of the hardest tasks that was ever asked of me. I’ve some mixed emotions and feelings about ripping the heart of the dark past wide open and showing all its scars! However, what I’m about to write is pertaining to your future and my past experience. This we had in common, it intertwines, so I want to extend and put in place my deepest and sincere apology beforehand, for all the things you will be forced to endure. Now, at your tender age of 6 years old, your beautiful and innocent world as you know it to be will change abruptly. When the person you trust and love the most will be the person to inflict upon your innocence, with your first emotional and physical scar, I only wish you could’ve stayed innocent, but I’m truly sorry to say it will not be the case!

You may question why anyone wants to hurt young you, but at the mature age of 52 years old, you still will not arrive at that answer. Before you turn 7 years old, your mother, who you just adore, will accidentally burn you with some hot water that was meant for your older brother, Julian. This I promise you will get through, like every other thing else that comes your way. Though it will scar you for life, and your legs and thighs will be the reminder, life will not be fair to you, and as you transition through life, it will become apparent.

Your grandmother, Florence, who you love so much, will pass away after falling and hitting her head on the concrete, from one of her seizure attacks! This will become your first encounter with death, and I’m sure it will not be your last. Death will become a common theme, that plays around your everyday living and manufactured violence will become a daily reality for your childhood. January 5, 1978. Your hero and Jamaican national soccer team member, Gutto and four others, will become victims of this normalized violence that will sweep across your neighborhood, and the Island nation when they get murdered. By powerful agent that is supposed to protect the country. Then the following year, you will become normalized violence indiscriminate youngest victim, when you will be shot by a stray bullet, and on your 9th birthday, in a hospital, trying to make sense of the nonsenses, witnessing your own trauma.

The next year, your neighborhood and Jamaica would engulf in more manufacturing violence. This time you will be awakened to the Gold Street Massacre! and things of this nature will overpower all your childhood senses and youthfulness, as it will condition your young mind to see the world through blurred reality and convert your attitude. Your mother who you will forgive, will rob you of a chance to really live life in its fullness, because she will steal your innocence over and over again, with her double personality of nurturer and abuser. The earliest memories that you will have of your childhood would be of your mother stripping you naked and putting you and your brothers out of the comfort of your home because she is upset that your father didn’t pay his child support. Another time she strips you naked and tied you up on a light post outside (because you misbehaved) in front of your house, while the kids from the neighborhood watch and laugh at you, and you will become the joke of the neighborhood for weeks! The only things that you will remember about your childhood is pain and the harm that was inflicted upon your young mind and body, by the same person you trust and love and who is supposed to protect you!

Another time, your mother will beat you with a belt buckle until it punctures your little arm and bursts your head. Beating and punishment will become your normal reality until your mother left for the state. Then and only then did the beating stop. You will go through some stuff, hardship and tough times and most of it will be your fault they will say. But the truth is that you will be given a raw deal to start life with and only a half stock deck to play the games of life with. The system will fail you, but that is no excuse! You will recover, I promise you!

They even tell you that you will not live to see your 18th birthday, and this will make you live a reckless lifestyle because you buy into the false prophecy, as if to say, let me die on my own terms, since I’m going to die anyway. And when you surpass the false prophecy, your thinking becomes immortal and even more reckless. Thinking death can’t touch you! A month after your 21st birthday, your best friend Delroy will get murdered and a month later, your cousin, Neatta will get killed as well. And all this alters your version of reality, and it will become even more distorted than it was before and you will veer even further off course into destructive head traffic. You will see death around like flies buzzing and you will become a master of pain and grief. Your life will become just that, a life of painful pain and you will cause yourself and others a lot of pain and grief in the process. You are going to turn to anger and violence to cope and escape your own childhood trauma. Your impulsive thinking and criminal lifestyle will become the things that make you find yourself in prison, at a young age of 25 years old.

In prison, you will search far and wide to better understand why you are the way you are, why you acted the way you did. You will learn why you tuck your trauma so deep down inside that you forget that it is even there and be unable to live and function a balanced life, until it surfaces in your young youthful age, while in prison. You will spend many agonizing years asking why it was hidden so well. However, you will become better at dealing with the hidden that gives you anxiety! You will wish you had met someone who you could trust and who was more equipped to understand what you were dealing with and going through internally at the time, to help you navigate the landmine that awaits you. I’m happy to say that in spite of all the harm you cause others and yourself, you will find self-worth and self-love through many years and hours of behavioral therapeutic treatment with the self-help group that was offered to you in prison.

You will revisit your childhood and unpack all the hurt, the pain, the suffering and the invisible scars. You will learn that you were a victim, way before you victimized others and you will also learn that hurt people hurt people and you will understand and grasp the decisions and choices that you made as a youth, responding to your experience and childhood trauma, even though your youth was written in pain. You will break the mentality chain that caused your youthful ruin and, I must add, that you will no longer see the world through blurred lenses or be defined by what happened to you, but by what you do with what happened to you.

Last but not least, I’m your 52-year-old self and as I accompany you through your trial-and-error journey, I promise you this as I promised you before, you will survive it all and we will be okay. I loved you yesterday, I love you today and I promise you that I will love you tomorrow!

IN THE IMAGE OF MASTER
By Norman WIlliams

Straight outta master image, savageville!
Trap inna capitalistic systematic tectonic den.
Structure and raise on sorrow and despair,
Eating pain for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Has I walk through the valley of
The shadow of death.

Caught up in a mask democratic
Political upheaval, strong arm robbing
My innocence. Every chapter charted and
Coursed by pain, a portrait journeying

In still-water.

In the making of a monster
In the image of master.

Only eight and shot with a snob nose 38,
By age nine I am playing with tek 9.

A product of the slum, from
Flatbush brooklyn to south central L.A.
By way of southside Kingston
Me and my negus chained together
Inna bottomless pit, like the bottomless
Ships that landed on plymouth
Rock, standing on the block packing
Them gock and some fresh cut rock.

Off to the rat-race
Green like a rain-forrest!
Young train over night killa
Getting drunk on redrum!

Pop pop pop the gock stay cock
Ready to get hot and clap back.

Killa want to kill me and them
Negus shotta want to shoot me.
Hunting me like the hutu hunting
The tutsi, ready to slaughter me
Like them slaughter Malcolm. So I
Am staying busy trying to stay alive.
Conflicted and addicted to my destructive
Contradiction, tied down and force feed
Master monster ailment, raping, murdering
And plundering my own jewels.

Deliberately assaulting my culture, destroying
The symbols of my strength and
The first line of defense.
My black manhood our black manhood,
The resource of our community,
Entering into extinction while we massacre
Our fundamental values, that hold
The threads together. That nubian queen
has never been given her proper esteem.

Like white ants invade our mind
With willie lynch master plan.
John Hopkins Dr. Richter rat, man
And the welfare state hacking our identity,
Stockholm Bill Clinton sydrome.

Slaying our sons and suffering
Our woman alive, to their
Dominant fantasist exotic crave

Layed over white man rapping our black jewels.
Enslavement layed over colonization.
Cotton picking layed over tobacco farming.
Thirteenth amendment layed over slavery.
Police man layed over ku kluxklansman.

Mass incarceration layed over mass kidnapping.
Police killing layed over white mop lynching.
Stop and fist layed over Jim Crow system
Purity layed over white supremacist.
Capitalism demo (N) cracy layed over white power.

Master image layed over black identity,
In the making of a monster in master
New plan old plan the same plan,
Same pain same trauma.

OH ‘SHE’S
By Norman WIlliams

Oh” she is mesmerize with my ink
Oh’ she is infatuated with my penmanship. Oh’ she in awe of my word play.

Oh’ she is getting hypnotize by my punching oh’ she is addicted to my flow
Oh she is attracted to my style.

Oh’ she is in love now with my metaphor,
Oh’ she ready to have an affair with
My realism.

Oh’ she wants to feel my irony,
Oh’ she wants to massage mystanza,
Oh’ she frenching my logic.
Oh’ she blowing on my rhetoric,
Oh’ she climbing my reasoning,
Oh’ she want to play with my word-play.

Oh’ she wants a relationship with my thought
Oh’ she want to be intimate with my intellect
Oh she want to marry my wisdom.

Death by LWOP
By Norman Williams

Indicted, Arrested, Arraigned and then Tried,
Convicted and sentenced to Death. The unknown
Death by prolongation of incarceration; LWOP
The other Death penalty,

The stereotypical policy guideline Death.
The ugly mandatory sentencing Death.
The exclusionary incorrigible Death.
The encapsulation and incapacitation Death

The Death by a sustainable barbaric war
On Black and Brown skins.
Death by discontinuation against Black and
Brown skins, like an old apartment building,
That is declare unfit for use,
Under the rights of the state eminent domain.

Whether Death by the Death penalty, or
Death by prolongation of
Incarceration, it will be the same anomaly.
When you enter the asymmetric atmosphere of
Death, and despair; You stood, steadying your feet
And walk silently among the fragment of

The underclass and the vicious realities; while
Going towards a custom that served many wounded
And their dying soul their Death by LWOP.

GUARDRAIL
By Norman Williams

Today I dive into my own depth
Of uncharted contradiction of
Yesterday, and unchain the apparel
Of destruction and displace values.

With boldness and daily struggle
To accurately imprint the right
Fundamental principle on my heart.

To prepare to fight those ideals
That misguided me. Many are called
Few are choosen.
Blindfold and fingers cross
Criss-crossing an unfamiliar path
With uncertainty lies in the benefit
Of one own realm of erect truth.

Penetrating the method of my own
wrong choices and drowning error.

Awaken to my stagnant sleeping negligence
To liberate my contradiction from the
Invisible worm-eating mind control indoctrinating
View.

Removing the guard-rail of decorative fallacy
And weaponize my mind to the historical tales
Of monstrosity. Written

Self Store
By Norman Williams

It
is my wish
to reach the top of mount hope;
while, redemption deferred,
adjusting yet obligated to proceed

and
leave the
weight of my circumstance.
Looking beyond my self, beyond my circumstance
and vacation into the high-sounding of self-discovery

and
self-rebuilding that
bring-forth what is within me,
personal feelings both solitary and private.
As terrifying as it maybe, I shall then push forth,

and
pursue even
at the risk of my heart thought,
and the awkward qualities of fear
that is held together by dread of shame,

and
the anxiety of
grief to discover the weight
of the moment, pain hostility, and my own
inability to get out up under the clutches

of
childhood trauma
that are present in proximity;
so as I shake off the yoke and succeed
in my attempt, and recover that which

was
stolen and return
to the condition of self preservation
as well as an added power to conserve
and restore, what I already have by dint of exercise.

The Shores Of No Sea’s
By Norman Williams

Countless years walking the shores of no seas,
Like walking along an arid oasis
Looking endlessly,
Looking for vitality, in the blistering heat.
In circle
Walking beside waves of floating debris, that
No one see.

That no one cares to see!
A shipwreck of castaways, shatter and scatter below
Below the deck of the shallow
Riverbed-
Up the river
Behind the rim of mount Lady Liberty, where the sun
Justice doesn’t shine, Yet
The moon humanity shines
It brightest in the dark cover of inhumaneness.

In the darkess hours of inhumaneness,
Walking along the endless shores of no seas,
In a faraway hamlet land
That no one seen-that no one want to see,
Drifting on hot sands,
Like dried up wheat or like withered grass or
Like blowing away leaves or like clouds dissolving.
Or like summer dreams deferred,
Or like shallow footprints washed away!

Along the coastline
of no coastal seacoast,
Like dead corpses floating alongside seaweeds
Floating and washed up on the shores
Of no seas!

CONCRETE COLONY
By Norman Williams

Prison! a state institution,
under the government jurisdiction;
a place of confinement.
Where law-makers seize law-breakers.
Or lawful men held in costudy.
kept under involuntary restraint.
Deprived of their liberty and sometime, place into unlawful laboratary;
solitary confinement!
in a promised land of the free,
the two warring reality, of humanity and inhumanity.
The land of the free,
the home of the imprisonment.
Vail in a peonage cage of inhumane indigity.

In The Entombed Valley
By Norman Williams

And all the seconds are slipping far away
And all the minutes are running fast away.
And all the hours are not here to stay:
And all the my mornings are very blurry.
And all my afternoons are very waery.
And a l l my evenings are very dreary.

And all my nights are in vigil with restlessness.
And all my days are in the ruin trench of solitary madness.
And all my weeks are in the lonesome region of stagnant sadness
all my months are obscure and lost into formlessness.

And all my years are a tlength corroding withint eh entombed
Valley of CDCR
And all my life, my everything are drowning in endlessness,
Where all my hopes weeping tears falls on barren souls ears.

Welcome To America
By Norman Williams

Welcome to America;
The two America, the pristine America
And the mythology America, that masquerading
Under the anthem of democracy and freedom rights
Advocacy America. The unaligned moral compus America.
With it spoil construction, that frightened the Black
Masses of America, into a social and economic paralysis.

Welcome to America;
The structural contradiction America,
To Black Men bodies that keep falling persistently,
Into it Penal Colonies or laying riddled with bullets,
Disfigured and dismantled on it Blood-Stain soil.- With
An overlapping of State Terror, and it unnatural inflicted
Just us – justice.

Welcome to America;
The great fallacy of Land of The Free America, that
Systematically destroyed Black Lives, Individually
And Collectively. The America where Black Lives don’t Matter.
The America that decimate the fabric of Black Community,
And it Black Consciousness, while rapping it Cultural Identity,
And it Black Humanness and Humanity.

Welcome to America;
The base pretense of human rights,
The fi v e percent (5%) of the world population;
Who imprisoned twenty fi v e (25% of the world human being.
Welcome to the American way America; The inequality America,
The Social Apartheid America, The Ethnic Genocide America,
Is our America – So welcome to our America.

Building a Future
By Norman Williams

Building
A future
Out of nothing,
Just hopes and dreams,
And a desire
To take one step
Further,

Than the last,
Slowly and
Precisely,
Laying the foundation
Of love,
Upon the ruins
Of the past,

My past;
Sweeping the rooms
Of sorrows, and
Emptying the house
Of the pain,

My pain;
Scrap by scrap.
And gradually,
Refurbish the presence
Inner peace,
Self-love and empathy.

Unworthy Me
By Norman Williams

My American dreams,
My highest aspiration
I found empty, hollow — shallow
Droplets of the American dreams.

Droplets of the American dreams
Inside the American theme,
My American dreams sleepless
Inside my sorrow tomorrow.

Inside my sorrow tomorrow
I dream the American dreams
And find myself wide awake
Inside my American nightmare

Inside my American nightmares,
I’m injured with chronic poverty
And folded up inside a systematic ideal,
That mutilates my highest aspiration;

My American dreams — never meant for unworthy
Me.

The Constant State of Time
By Norman Williams

The constant state of motionless time,
Moving, but going nowhere. This endless
Stillness of frozen time — in slow motion.
Time in its constant state, like snowflakes
Falling from the sky, in its constant state.
A victim of hard time, that drag on and on
Way too long, like a prisoner of time.

Living on borrowed time, the same day,
The same way — the same week, the same month
And the same year after year the same way.
No life I’ve, but what vanished away;
When that which was and that which is,
Constantly slipping away, far — far away.
At times I felt like my world is in decay;
This constant state of time reality

Having me searching for something,
Anything, with some satisfaction, yet
I found nothing, but time in its constant state.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no time out,
No end in sight, just a life in its stillborn state.
And this constant state of doing time;
With failing feet and days that hurt,
When time rotates in its constant state.