There are millions and we are all different — Roll Call — Reginald Dwayne Betts. Martin Espada. Monica Youn. Edgar Lee Masters. Lawrence Joseph. J.P. Howard. The list is long. Millions worldwide. Poets who are also lawyers. Lawyers who are also poets. It feels like it is not a fit but it is for me. Always fit. For many, like Evie Shockley…

My favorite guided spiritual meditation — Many nights, I listen to guided meditations to fall asleep. It is how I am wired. A soft voice to put me in the present and to focus on nothing at all but the immediate. It is how to live. No worries about tomorrow, yesterday, or some bill to pay…

White Supremacists, Of Course. — “Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.” — Derrick Bell Way back in 1995, Derrick Bell, one of the key players in the Critical Race Theory movement, wrote about the attacks on the movement from many different ideological spectrums. This is back when CRT…

Hughes’ birthdate always announces African American History Month — “I have a new job at a hotel. . . . The place I work is quite classy. There are European waiters and it caters largely to ambassadors and base-ball players and ladies who wear diamonds.” — Langston Hughes, Oct. 9, 1925, Washington, D.C. (from “The Big Sea”) It was…

(Inspired by Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’) — My wedding ring came off when I was shooting basketball in the rain one morning. It was wet outside, and my hands became slippery. My ring, a gold ring from the world famous jeweler Tiffany’s, had roman numerals on the side that don’t mark time. Tiffany’s calls it their Atlas…

Let’s chop up some history and progress — The NFL For the first time in its history, the National Football League in its flagship event — the Super Bowl — will not have a “white” quarterback starting for either team. It doesn’t matter to me really. But, it seems to matter to the media. This fact has been mentioned everyday…

Is the white-collar world about to be hit like Flint, Michigan? — I have friends who are using CHAT-GPT. They are using it for all sorts of written tasks. I say they are playing with fire. When automation came to the industrial blue-collar areas in America, and when jobs were outsourced, these parts of the U.S. lost jobs like trees lose leaves…