Today I will praise.

I will praise the sun

For showering its light

On this darkened vessel.

I will praise its shine.

Praise the way it wraps

My skin in ultraviolet ultimatums

Demanding to be seen.

I will lift my hands in adoration

Of how something so bright

Could be so heavy.

I will praise the ground

That did not make feast of these bones.

Praise the casket

That did not become a shelter for flesh.

Praise the bullets

That called in sick to work.

Praise the trigger

That went on vacation.

Praise the chalk

That did not outline a body today.

Praise the body

For still being a body

And not a headstone.

Praise the body,

For being a body and not a police report

Praise the body

For being a body and not a memory

No one wants to forget.

Praise the memories.

Praise the laughs and smiles

You thought had been evicted from your jawline

Praise the eyes

For seeing and still believing.

For being blinded from faith

But never losing their vision

Praise the visions.

Praise the prophets

Who don’t profit off of those visions.

Praise the heart

For housing this living room of emotions

Praise the trophy that is my name

Praise the gift that is my name.

Praise the name that is my name

Which no one can plagiarize or gentrify

Praise the praise.

How the throat sounds like a choir.

The harmony in your tongue lifts

Into a song of adoration.

Praise yourself

For being able to praise.

For waking up,

When you had every reason not to.

EyeAmBic performs “Good Man” at Winthrop University.

So the other day i was talking to my sister
When all of a sudden she tells me
“You know a good man is hard to find”
That in this world full of scrubs and snakes
It's hard for a woman to find her prince.
A man worthy of her time.
She says that all the good men are either taken or gay
And half the the ones that are taken
Are still probably gay.

I just laugh and say “sis I’m sorry to tell you this
But there’s no such thing as a good man”
She looked at my kinda crazy like
“I helped raise your little black self,
You better be a good man”.
Look its a lie. An illusion.
Something someone else made up
To make you feel better about who we truly are.
Because honestly there’s nothing good about any of us.

See from the day we’re born
we’re trained to be hunters and gatherers.
Taught to treat you like prey, while setting traps with our teeth.
Turning our smiles into funhouse mirrors
That make you see something that truly isn’t there.
See we knew how to call you “hoes before we learned how to read.

Told you we’d rather see you wash the dishes than make the Dean’s list.
Forced you to play house when we could have
Been paying you some attention.
We were not born to be righteous.
The world never showed us how to worship the
God in you, So we prey on you instead of pray for you.
We betray you.
Speak in the language of Judas.
Hide serpents in our blood stream, castrate the Eve from our ribs
While this Adam’s apple chokes on our manhood.

The truth is that most men have a canine complex.
We call you a female dog, turn you doggy style,
Live in a dog house and we love chasing cats,
Cause its nothing but the dog in us.
See around here we love to make it rain.
Watch the precipitation drown your spirit
When we swim inside of you.
Tell you to bust it open while we bust down your self esteem.
Turned you from a queen to a video vixen.
From a universal constellation to a world star.
We have sliced the Coretta out of your conscience.
Screwed the Sojourner out of your truth.
Assassinated the Assata from your symphony,
Detonated your destiny with our weapons of mass destruction.

Cause ya’ll it is hard to be a good man
When you are raised to have such bad intentions.
When our fathers left before they signed the birth certificate.
When we saw men Rihanna and Tina Turner your face
Into a walking punchline.
When we were taught how to prey
Before we learned how to pray.

And I wish I could apologize for them,
But ladies I can’t because I am them.
We are all them.
But there’s a few of us who know
that while we may never be good men,
We’re damn sure gonna die trying.