POETRY

"He prefers pencils to pens when writing
He prefers raspy songs
Stretching life's etchings across waiting pages
Echoing metal skates marking asphalt streets
Gritty strokes evoke emotions of life wearing down
Wearing dull diminishing skill
Less accurate estimated accomplishments
Daily grind sharpeners push hand farther and further back
Less life to hold on to"

               -an excerpt from  Pencils in Clayton Singleton's Escape from Freedom

This inspiring book of poetry and poetic lecture is a testimony to the hearts of courage and a supply of tools necessary in the transformation from being limited by limited ideologies and implications of "being Black" and "being free"  into a development of "self within society" where race is not the determining factor of one's culture, convictions, concerns or successes."Freedom" is not the situation of "not having to do anything" but rather the ability to do anything and taking the action necessary to tell life what to do.

       -the following is an excerpt from the poem For US  from the sensational book Escape From Freedom by Clayton Jerome Singleton

I was Born and raised in Virginia
So you know I'm bringing issue to circumstance
Cause the wealth isn't common
In the commonwealth
Millionaires live next to despair
Benzes drive by like crossing guards
With cardboard signs aren't even there
I do this for us
I do this for me
I do this for thugs in park place
Living restrictive lives like boas
Toting guns like Noah
For married single mothers
Whose husbands are never home
For unwed single mothers whose babies daddy
Never shown true interest in his own children
Wrote this for Bowling Park and Ocean View families
Shelving dreams
Forced from subsidized housing then
Offered costly new homes built on gun shell rich
Soil straining to buy but
Can't reach dreams placed on shelves
Cause the cost of living's too high...