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    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
    If I Only Had Five Minutes: The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet
    Ebook70 pages29 minutes

    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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateMar 8, 2011
    ISBN9781456731472
    If I Only Had Five Minutes: The Last Will and Testament of a Hip Hop Poet

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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

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