If I Only Had Five Minutes: The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet
By Tia DeShay
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About this ebook
I remember attending an Open Mic session at a venue located in downtown Detroit. A poet took the stage and before reciting his piece, he said that a poet has five minutes to impact his or her audience either negatively or positively. What a poet said in those five minutes could either create change or maintain the status quo.
I went home that evening and asked myself, What if, after five minutes, I could no longer write poetry for the rest of my life. What would I write in my last five minutes? The answer? If I Only Had Five Minutes. The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet.
If I Only Had Five Minutes. The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet is a three disc compilation: Life, Love, & Rhymes. In 26 poems I speak his language, swallow her pain, dream my memories, and create our rhythm. In my five minutes I fill white space with unlimited possibility. In my five minutes, I write now, so others can remember later
What will you do with your five minutes? Tia DeShay
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Book preview
If I Only Had Five Minutes - Tia DeShay
Playlist
Prelude
Disc One: Life
Interlude:
Female Terrorism
Conversate to Elevate
I Carry the Cross
Page 2A
White Tee
Tupac Shakur
God’s Gift
Our Grown Woman Selves
Despair
Disc Two: Love
I’ll Always Love Him
Detroit Love
Best Supporting Actress
Giving Birth
Wisdom
Interlude:
Love Is
Untitled
I Can Only Be Me – A Celebration Poem
Thought Process
Disc Three: Rhymes
All I Really Want for Christmas
Black Thought
I Knew You Was a Real Poet
Real Talk
I Spy
The Process
I Apologize for Not Being a Rapper…
If I Only Had Five Minutes – The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet
Interlude:
Closing Credits:
Prelude
I was born in Detroit, Michigan. In 1990, at the age of fifteen, I experienced my first teenage love affair. His name was Hip Hop. Hip Hop and I met through a socially conscious rap group, X Clan. Their album, To the East, Blackwards
was the first poem Hip Hop wrote to me. I carried it around in my pink boom box and listened to it whenever my parents were not around. Hip Hop’s game was flawless. I was hooked.
Our rendezvous included early morning affairs with Rob Base’s video It Takes Two
before I attended classes at Cass Technical High School. Eventually, my parents accepted our relationship. From that point, Hip Hop introduced me to his friends: Salt – n – Pepa, Whodini, Beastie Boys, JJ Fad, Heavy D. and the Boyz, The Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff, and the Fat Boys. I loved the way Hip Hop used language to create a space on notebooks and on wax where words were raw, uncensored, thought provoking, and street smart. Hip Hop was Pavlow and I was his test subject.
After leaving home at the age of seventeen, my affair with Hip Hop became more explicit, illicit, dangerous, and self-destructive. He started calling me out my name and abusing my airwaves. But I was too far gone to let go. Our relationship hit a turning point when his man, Tupac Shakur was murdered in 1996 when I was an undergraduate at Eastern Michigan University.
Shakur’s death revealed a side of Hip Hop, that before Shakur’s death, my mind was not prepared to comprehend. But, in 1996, I understood that Hip Hop, like most men, when taken out of their context, detached from their roots, were