All The Critics Love Me in New York (Or at least the NYABJ Does!)

After spending far too much of my you chasing after awards that would do nothing but end up forgotten in my mother's drawers somewhere, I think I woke around 18 and stopped giving a fuck. If you were to go through my college yearbook (which I never even got a copy of) you'd only see me on the newspaper staff, but I'm not even sure that I took the picture. With what I do and the type of dude I am, I would've killed myself by now waiting for recognition from someone else, especially in a town that breeds insecure haters like the rats beneath the city.
So when my Newsweek editor, Joshua Alston, hit me up a week or so ago to say that I was a finalist for the Best Personal Commentary Award by the New York Association of Black Journalists, the first thing I told him was "Get back to me when you know who the winner is." I had had too many disappointments to get my hopes up about such a thing, even if he said I had a good chance. But last night I get an e-mail from him as the results came in! I won! The little essay I wrote in under an hour got me the first award I've received for my writing since college. Go Figure!

My friends Seda and Anisah were good enough to buy me a beer in celebration. It was a perfect way to lead into a day about love, as writing in itself (the act of it and not the business) is probably the only love withing my history that has never disappointed me, that has never flaked, that has never embraced me for it's own self interest. I called upon it and it was there. This is the truth in my life that I am most proud of. So with no further ado I bring you an annual tradition in these parts: My Love Poem for the Year:



A Love Poem for '08
By Kenji Jasper

All my life I wanted to be a farmer,
Get me a piece of land and work it for all my days,
Watch that soil's surface change and shift,
Till it and feed it,
'Til it belched up milk, honey and Brazillian paella with shrimp and thick garlic chips.

A quiet life.
A simple life.
A state of being banned from TV on the streets where I played only until the lights came on.

But every time I planted seeds my fields would be invaded,
By rabbits, and locusts, and crows,
Who wanted the treasure from my chest without as much as lifting a finger.
What good is fresh fruit with bites missing that aren't your own?

Scarecrows are just straw in a costume,
Gates and fences can be leapt and tunneled under,
It was open season on my home until I made it safe,

So the farmer had to learn how to hunt.

The tools had always been in my shed,
But I had been afraid of the seductive feel of steel in my palms,
I was afraid of getting blood on my babies,
Of starting a fire I couldn't put out.

But as I lurked through the fruits of my labor,
With soft eyes,
A double-barrel Mossberg in hand,
Poison on my back and traps around my waist,

I saw the face of God in the work I had to do.

Every trap I set snared the beasts that had plagued me,
Every drop of poison downed the pests eating me alive,
I shot the wax wings off those squawking birds,
and they fell before me.

I plucked them,
Then broiled them to feed to my kin,
There were so many birds that we might be full forever.

Then I headed back to the shed with both weapons and dinner in hand,
Almost home, I saw my two little boys looking at me in awe.

Their old man had become something else,
A thing very unlike the quiet soul who wrote them stories for before they went to bed.

Now seeing the man before them,
They wouldn't grow up scared of the tools they needed to use,
They'd never let the birds get the best of them.


Be good to yourself y'all! Make every day a LOVE day!. And make sure you know what love really is ;)

On a last and final geek note, here's the trailer for the new Indiana Jones flick. I'm lovin'it!

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/indianajones.html?showVideo=1

Out.