Sum People - by hakim bellamy

If school
is supposed to be where I go
to find the answers,

why are you asking me?

Are my questions not good enough?
Like, “What is the meaning of life?”

The first time,
I was told to stop asking questions
was when I was three?

“Mommy, what’s that?”
“Daddy, what’s that?”
“Mommy, who’s that?”
“Daddy, where’s that?”
“How?” “When?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why?”

The last time
I was told to stop asking questions
was my first day of high school?

Because “You don’t want to look stupid, do you?
But what if
I do?

I mean, what if I don’t know?
What will I ever know?
How will I ever know?
When will I ever know?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?

What if this
is a test?

Life.

A sheet of paper
the size of a diploma
except with all the answers on the back.

Only the answers,
right in front of you
all the meaning anybody could ever ask for,

and the only way to “win” the test
is to get it “write.”

W-r-i-t-e…write
the right
question.

Sum people,
we’re kinda like math,
the sum total of each other.

Our lives
one long quadratic equation,
except I already know what I want to be…

loved.

That answer lives
so obviously on the other side of the equal sign,
but on this side
I’m fumbling with the combination lock inside me,
wondering

“Y do I have to solve for X?”

It’s elementary, not algebra
ask Watson.

A charade of guessing games,
in a lesson plan of clues,
when all you really wanna know
is what’s on the other side of this cap’n gown?

Post high school,
the first “after” life.

But if we are intellectually honest
we’ll tell you the truth
we’ll tell you that we don’t know.

But what we do know
is that discourse
leads to discovery,
and that can be taught.

Listening can be taught.
The desire to learn
is a pilot light
that we can teach you to ignite,
any time you like!

No, we can’t possibly know
all the places you’ll go
but we can teach you how to fly.

We know that the practice of asking questions
is kryptonite to the ego
and it is through the resultant cracks
that beams of enlightenment
begin peeking through.

Because questions
render us vulnerable,
an act of trust that requires an opening up
to another human being.

Even G-d
in her infinite wisdom,
and the abundance of cheat codes
in her back pocket, will tell you
that the earthlings she hears from most
never request answers

…other then the occasional lottery number.

Most prayers
are a string of questions,
asking for actions,
asking for wisdom,
asking for help.

It is the questions that bless us,
the questions that teach us.

Teach us that
arrogance, is an island,
and sometimes true learning
only happens
when we lose our cool.

Because questions
are cool, and what school
should be asking me to do

is interrogate myself.

So I don’t leave here
knowing what I want to be,
but asking myself what problems
I want to solve?

How do I want to change the world?

And when exceptionally brave,
both school and student,
it will graduate me
to the most profound question I can find?

Who am I?

© Hakim Bellamy May 27th, 2016