The Moments Ain’t Worth The Minutes Jilly Takes

The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours: The Poetry of Jill Scott when I first reviewed it made me have high expectations.  Jilly from Philly is a snaps and taps poet, slam poet that shows her ass on the poetry tip on her albums and shows.  I’m a poet and I love poets.  So when I first got my hands on it I thought wow, this bitch is about to jump out and just mind fuck everybody.

Not only was that wrong but this sorry excuse for coasting on Sonia Sanchez’s shoulders fails miserably AND it ain’t aged well.

This poetry musing is all balls and no shaft.  I’m articulate madness – I know a thing or two about iambic pentameter seeing as I write rhythmic epic verse.  Jilly from Philly seems to capture that in her music but not when and where it counts – ON THE DAMN PAGE.  Don’t tease me like a tawdry wench on your album and then leave me high and dry with a bunch of prose that sounds like a therapy session gone wrong because your ass came into the therapist office and started talking to the person in the suit waiting to be seen and thought THAT WAS THE THERAPIST.

I expect a lot.  Don’t give me five fucking sections of poetry and talk about dumb shit, irrelevant shit, shit that I doubt has crossed your mind.  All The Evil And All The Love, a play on a line from the film The Color Purple, is a turd floating.  A nothing burger about bad dick, nigger shit, and getting your ass beat is the ticket to orgasm.  Haiku are merely the author’s random thoughts, oversaturated with half-hearted attempts at being “deep” but come off as opinionatedly conceited which now makes me think Jilly from Philly is cray-cray in the head and need somebody’s meds so she can make cognitive sentences.  I Be Thinking is an ad mixture of the author’s thoughts spliced with our protagonists’ angst, caught between a cry for help and a masochistic need to fit in, be happy, and have a man at all costs.  Us Sistahs Sometimes attempts to finally give us strong boss bitches but loses itself and its point halfway through the long-winded prose that sounds more like a valedictorian speech than FUCKING POEMS.  Poetry 4 Poets And Folks Who Would Like To Be seem to be a boring compost of filler comprised of half finished pieces, audition material, and ideas for live stage performances rather than a strong, comprehensive, and concise finale.  In other words, the conclusion was something she jotted on a napkin eating at International House of Pancakes because a jelly stain made her write an origin haiku, my sistah.

Jilly from Philly let me down.  Don’t play a bout it bitch on the record and come off like a chicken head coming home to roost in the poems. Nothing is in here that makes me give a shit.  I don’t fucking care about yeast infections you got from fucking bad dick.  I don’t care about yeast infections you got from fucking questionable dick.  I don’t care that you feel you need your ass beat to get halfway decent dick.  Buy a better toy and write some better poetry.

These fucking poems are boring, unimaginative, repetitive in tone, and plainly just don’t fit well together.  It settles on our palettes as a rehab session gone terribly with your therapist offering top shelf cocaine, It simmers in bitterness as we are thrust into a pattern of misguided sexual thoughts, judgmental femininity, and lackluster self-esteem poetics that bores us to tears and all because you mad at what the dick didn’t do to you.  Filler of old poetry more than twenty years old is put in to blend the taste of dread we struggle with trying to wade the mediocre waters to the end.

Jill Scott can do better.  Quit chasing dick and figure the poems out.  Sonia Sanchez needs her poetry card revoked caping for this bullshit.