John McKinley Pride Jr. Poetry & Art

I stood and watched as the sea swallowed the sun. My spirit sunk deep into sorrow. My bones felt light and hallow, my eyes weeping in pure sadness. My mouth was open in awe. Defenseless I felt clenching the skin of my arms in torment hoping to see the sun rise again. All I could do was stand there; all I could do was watch. I could not scream out for at the moment my voice was lost. I felt frozen in time for that moment of what felt like an eternity in someone else’s nightmare. I told myself to turn away but I could not; there was a hope in me that it would all be just an illusion. My mind was lost in the moment and not able to grasp the reality of what I was seeing. I thought to myself in disbelief, “Was this possible?” The sea creeping up across the sun diming its shimmering light, Diming its hope, Diming its love, Diming its life, Taking precious souls into its depths of unknown blackness, swelling and growing like a diseased madness. The sun bare with nothing left, leaving the bold

A new spoken word poem on my Youtube account at riverboatsong. "I Walk With the Zebra" Why can't life be seen as the way we see the zebra? Black and white and you know what you have in front of you; it's not a horse and you already know that. It does not lie to you and it does not try to be what it is not; between the black lines are white lines and between the white lines are black lines. There they are in front of you; it looks like a horse, it runs like a horse and it lives in herds like a horse. Yet it is not a horse; it does not lie to you, you see the truth it's there in front of you it does not hide facts. Here I am in front of you; you see my white lies and you see the black of my demise. I do not travel in herds; I can do all my miss leadings on my own. So as you can see there are fine lines to read between just the printings on the wall to tell you that it is all over. Like tattooed zebras we slurry our lies on our skin and strut as no one knows nothing