to move up and down
Be-Side
The Home of Hakm's B-Side e-alter ego...his auxiliary brain or external hard drive...
Went to sleep in Albuquerque and woke up in Africa … as a featured poet on Badilisha Poetry! Here’s what my Executive Assistant Ronica Brooks had to say:
“Take a look at one of the latest main page poetryfeatures on Hakim Bellamy. He makes an appearance on the Badilisha Poetry Radio Show and recites his poem entitled “Place Matters”. See him as he paints a portrait of life deeply affected by what place we are in, out of, or sometimes kept from.
Go to http://badilishapoetry.com/ to see the page feature!! Enjoy!”
Thank you to Linda Kaoma and the rest of the Badilisha family! Thanks to Diles and Atom Ortiz for helping me with the audio track!
Click the pic above to go to the Bandcamp and support Bernalillo County Place Matters.
We are in Washington, DC for two days with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies doing what people who make a living in the District of Columbia SHOULD always be concerned with…the HEALTH of all Americans.
“We are only as HEALTHY as the least among us.” me
I’m honored to be the keynote poet at the Place Matters: National Health Equity Conference “Models of Action, Innovation & Collaboration.” Tonight, DC can join me in a HEALTHY dosage of poetry tonight at Busboys and Poets (5th & K) with 2x HBO Def Poet Regie Cabico.
Follow our Live Tweet @OurPlaceMatters and @BCPlaceMatters #pnmc2012
Check out the Urban Verbs Fam, Reviva and more rock art for hope, recovery & heroin awareness. Breaking Bad star Steven Michael Quezada will MC as we try to raise funds to build a comprehensive adolescent treatment center. $30 a person, $50 a couple…please help us help our teenagers that need help. AND have a good time while you are doing it (Steven is a comedian too, so it won’t be all sad…there will be smiles…and hope!) Click on the flyer above to go to the site and see the details!
Pssst…if you are peeking now…don’t ruin the surprise…this poem is not supposed to debut until tonight at 7:54pm at this event! shhhhh….
Tell My Horse with apologies to Zora Neale Hurston
– hakim bellamy
Said
“We love it SO much”
That we’ll one day
Become it
They are talking about
Zombies
Cause as teens
We are so into zombies
That we
Turn into zombies
We’ve got our ways
Got our own ways
Of living between
6 feet beneath here
And hell
We’ve got out own ways
Of living dead
Of animated corpses
Of taking life out of 3D
And putting it in 2
High
And not
There is Voodoo in our veins
That they call junk
And just like food
It fills our souls
Black magic,
Black tar & Black gold
Fuels those empty tunnels
Inside of us
By keeping our trains
In tracks
Bath salts
Will only return us to the catacombs
That we just conquered
An Ex
Once told me that an OD
Felt a lot like sleep, ya know
It felt like I was close to death
And I could go
And I wouldn’t even know it
But “Life” has some nerve
We feel every minute of it
Drug from us
At the pace of a funeral procession
Kicking, screaming and laughing
Like a memory
Life lives
And leaves slow
Like a zombie
It is not what we inhale
Ingest or inject
It is what we love
It is what loves us
And who doesn’t
That. Is what we become
We’ve become walking survivors
Of society’s decomposition
Built on a landfill of backwards values
Buried next to a flag-wrapped cadaver
Suffering from the soldier’s sickness
There is nothing new about opiate addictions
Greeks have been getting high since 3rd Century B.C.
And Haitians
Invented Zombies
My chemical witchcraft
Is inherited from bokors
Forefather spin doctors
Spend dollars on witchdoctors
In an economy that wagers both,
Our unborn and our undead youth
As collateral
FOR power
FOR profit
And just like the 80s
“Dad, I learned it by watching you.”
When it became apparent
That home
Was heartless
We took to street corners
Roofless
Yet get pointed at
By outdoorsmen saying
“Just like animals
You are what you shoot”
And though we’ve killed enough of ourselves
To know we are not immortal
At least we are bulletproof
We are zombies
We dodge and eat strays like a champ
Born into this society of “bigger” problems
Hunting for villains and victims
And we are what we kill
We are simply a mirror
If your child is spending too much time alone
In their tomb
Look at us
Look at you
If you notice a drastic change in your teens appearance
Ask questions
Even though it should be obvious
That some time between yesterday
AND NOW
That we were bitten and turned into zombies
Parent,
If your child doesn’t wake up for school
If we DON’T WAKE UP
Parent,
Maybe, JUST MAYBE, you could skip class today too
Maybe we need you
To be our sangoma and reverse this spell
Perhaps this “All the time” working,
Isn’t working
We are your reflection
There is a reason
We look like the nuclear holocaust
Going on inside of us
Wage war on us
Like an epidemic
When we deserve treatment
Like a biblical plague
The last time she got high
She said, “Every follicle on her body
Resembled an a sprawling cemetery
Of empty graves…
Dirtless
Holy…
And that smack hit her bloodstream
Like a shotgun of zombies crawling out of every single one.
‘Cross
her
skin”
There is a fluidity with death
That comes
After you’ve survived
And resurrected
Again and again
There is a reason we call this shit heaven
There is a lot in common
With us,
And Lazarus
And Jesus
And zombies
And sometimes we don’t know
Who is being sacrificed
Sometimes we don’t know
What we are turning into
Because we love it SO much.
And I’m not saying Jesus is a zombie
I’m just sayin’…
We are the warning signs
Not the problem
Yes,
There is an apocalypse coming
But please,
PLEASE
Do not
Blame the zombies.
© Hakim Bellamy August 11, 2012
Go Green. Go “Be”.
Or as the saying goes…”Once you go ‘Be’, you never go back!”…or something like that.
Support New Mexico Businesses (BEyond POETry LLC), Artists (me) and 4 year old offspring (my son)…BUY LOCAL!
And for the “old school” types who still only have a CD player in their cars…we are working out the details of having 2nd run of these “sold out” CD at Talking Fountain in Albuquerque.
JazzBars with Hakim Be & Friends
By Justin De La Rosa (Published in the Local-iQ on Wednesday, December 21st 2011)
This won’t just be nights of people in a dark room, snapping their fingers along to a walking bass line while some guy with a goatee and beret makes incomprehensible analogies. It will be nights of soulful selections by some of the Duke City’s best poets and hip hop artists who know their foundations are in ’50s jazz.
“We don’t bridge the gap between hip hop and jazz, we eliminate it,” Bellamy said.
JazzBars with Hakim Be & Friends
119 Gold SW, 505.243.5299
$12 (2 shows)
jazzbahabq.com
It’s odd. Every year on 9/11 I tend to be in the studio. Maybe it’s because we create to get over destruction. Coincidentally, this was a piece of the TEDxABQ Talk I did on Saturday. Production by Diles. On my album BE. Yesterday it was me and Camilo Quinones cooking a soon to be release track on relationships…get your radios ready.
REPRISE: Bringing back the first compilation by Diles, Mood Static. Some familiar faces from Gut Feeling…including me! “Take a Number featuring Hakim Be”
New Hakim Be & Diles!!! Check out “Fire Sale” on Gut Feeling. For the beatminers you can also get Gut Feeling (Instrumentals) at Bandcamp. Click through the cover art above and you can listen to Fire Sale and see more production by Diles! www.visceralview.com
A week later, Urban Verbs still thanks you, Albuquerque. (READ ME!: Live Creation from Friday June 17th Show @ Filling Station)
Letter to Hip Hop I (June 17th, 2011, Live Creation for Urban Verbs Show, Barelas USA)
-Hakim Be
Dear Hip Hop
Open your speakers
So you can speak
“Us”
Hear us
Mirrors
We are what you look like
In the morning
Good morning
From the kids you never slept on
Chased Boogie Monsters out of our imagination
Through headphones
The ones I snuck
Under sheet music
When mom banished the TV from my bedroom
From the generation that considered silence
Violence
You lullabied us
Pops worked two jobs so I could buy you
And I knew
When I grew up
I wanted to be just like you
The bastard Love Child of Gospel and Rock
You are what Blues turned into
Just to get hitchhikers to pick her up
A wax museum of classic sculptures
That never so much as flinched
When they called you a vulture
You’re the swan song of ugly ducklings
With your puberty of percussion
You turned awkward into popular
For many an acne’d b-girl
And four-eyed beat boxer
For all the kids
Who couldn’t play
Football, basketball or soccer
The same kids who
Stayed up all night
Playing Halo
And make believe movies of mobsters
But your competition’s a little more honest
Two heartless sleeves in a steel cage match
Soul, saliva and spit
Sprawled across the celebrity death rap
We fight the way you taught us
In the absence of battered mothers
And abusive fathers
We became dead beat authors
Break beat martyrs
The music of YOUR generation
Resurrected in HI-DEFinition audio
Dear Hip-Hop
We bomb these letters
Upside the womb of your Manhattan Projects
We are your Trinity products
However, nonviolent
The kids who are still feeling you
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(C) Hakim Bellamy, June 17th 2011 during Urban Verbs Friday Night Performance
Digital Digging Episode 2 by Diles featuring Jungle One, Hakim Be & Idris Goodwin AKA "Burque Noir"
Please peep what my musicman (Urban Verbs) does with this classic beat that’s been used and used before…by way of Black New Mexico Emcees…hence Burque Noir. Thanks Diles!
