Some criteria for doing what is right

Courageousness

I love those who don't know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over

Cooking to Cooking Music

And that, among men, you will always seem wild and strange, wild and strange even when they love you. Here however, you are in your own home and house, here you can talk freely about everything and pour out all the reasons; nothing here is ashamed of obscure obdurate feelings. Look good, sound good, be good, be the greatest

I'm serious (I'm playin')

Ever feel like, if you open your eyes as he leans on you like a child over the tiger rag, you'll find you've been dancing with a ghost

Would it matter so much, afterall. Would even the courage go gray and lifeless if you looked at it too again, too repeated, the dense riddle of it drifting into a conniption's afterlife: so calm. No more spite. No more opinions grazing the reed til it moans about them and sends them home to no where on a slurred keyless caravan of yes. I had him reading Ulysses outloud to me while I slid beneath headphones to watch and make the machines clap like the gimpy genius children of our 3 graces.

And we're enchanted against this hideous modern backdrop, no more panic or fear of no where. And the shades of unnumbed generations of cannibals are watching us from high on the side of a cliff, feeding us this pride of how I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you did just then, for the rest of my life

Ever feel like if he opens his eyes as you lean on him like a child over the tiger rag he'll find he's been dancing with a ghost

3 Graces, 4 Musicians

The universe is so accurate there's a mid-sized pony named after me in the home movie. Once she wins the race she trots around the fence at a toasting distance and it's as if the rider isn't even
there

She was sick of theatre, of the powder and rouge and the chatter of the greenroom

3 graces, 4 musicians, themes you know, witnesses

James Blood Ulmer's Love Nest. Can I be specific and still be understood. Do I have to be topical and ask the wooden question, the one stuck in the tree as: was he still playing the eternal monkey?

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Take Five
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How to prolong a dream: You quickly invent a dream which incorporates the disturbing element of reality as part of the dream

You see people praying to a european jesus, a white jesus, and you feel like it's a secret joke to lighten the slow drowsy approach to the summer hunt; he couldn't put his heart in it anymore

There's something so persuasive about inability. Can't/chanting. So we invent the gift. Charlie Parker's Out of Nowhere. We wanted to dress it up and put it in a fashion magazine and name it something we couldn't pronounce. Suffocate it with loud unintelligable perfume. We got together and imagined the sound of hooves on the hood of a star just about to slip off into some snag in the fabric of what we imagined joy was without the even/rider. We all understand each other. Now how do we protect our wax built castle from the devouring heat of our own fire

A drowsy silence broken by heavy footsteps

Divine songs attempted in easy language for the use of children (The Revolt of Angels)

All the versions are perfect

But how did I ever get in a fix like this, looking at all these faces,

forms of eternity. Mistaking them for the sad naked mannequin spotlit in the shop window/

Toppling over, palm on the glass like a borderline, you keep pushing mine/wondering

Are there any black astronauts or spacehoes out there quoting the earth without borders /you so country for that (hopefulness), for wanting that/hapless drifter/pushover (type)/you're national for that/a channeler/ an afro-sheen covered remote control frozen on channel 13

And your habit of not caring what the neighbors think is back/it's blackmagic again, never went away

And panting for silence since your mom just left for church, pimped out in her fedora and dark red lips. We called it a departure toward evidence of things not scene and after a gasp for privacy, ran after her in dark glasses and the mannequin's outfit humming Bessie Smith and inhaling the chase as dust as chaste as it was it was all veil for lust. Even the sorrow. Even the white rose on the window sill wilting and blooming at the same doomed sun, or come sunday, c'mon

Of evening's pressure on the heat of morning

Don't dance too close to the music boxes, it will affect your love making


We were back to quick kisses, yelling, you're it, and home as we played hide and seek

Pharoah's Blood (A meditation)

(To the Black Male Children) Overheard conversation

How did you get so skeptical and bold and broken and re-assemble?

Philosophy is a prison, it destroys the uncustomary things about us.

They (the elegant thinkers) they have attitudes, they have all the proper attitudes, but they have no true convictions—

and the technique of accommodation has broken down

Oh.

So the shy dialect is under the pressure of its quietness again. Quivering between pleasure and torture, exiting in the middle somewhere. Sacred pressure, we write our letters in there, back and forth across nations. Oh, how wide the letters get from wrecking western tunnels. Oh, the wreckage, the over-grown headlights, was it after the end of the world? A new symphony for improvisers.

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I'm not sure where we were but there was all the water and everyday I re-learned to fly my kite. When we thought about the girls we liked, and them phantom queens, tires sprung from our hands and the cards went blank and chrome-bland, rancid empty space vibrating the in the nook of a cave, Ron Carter solo, channel 13 in a L.A., a ufo scare or delight or network of starry pavement where we behave in raybans and ravens, electric candles for those who crave the boulevard, a ban on the light, or one of those night rainbows, where the vagrancy doesn't breed and all imitation is that extinction/suicide but so sleek we say the meaning of life is to learn how to die, and jump off the ledge of that child afterall, find out

I have never known a lethargic negro,
I have known a demoralized negro

Learned to be guilty of loving him anyways, in spite of himself.

We would watch re-runs of the Cosby Show while we talked on the phone

I feigned a crush on Theo. It was really Bill, called Cliff for T.V... which I found poetic like a trampoline in the home of adults where I kept it. Hope you had a crush on Denise

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I want to talk about you.

Maybe later.

But, did you see those two kids on the beach, one holding a stray tire?

Sometimes it's an intertube, for floating, sometimes it's a telescope. The whole zone of it is afro-blue, you want to warn them to get in and roll out but they're young enough to learn to swim without it

I'm sitting in front of the white horse...

Our (cause ain't shit funny) Valentine

California Love

This is one of those night rainbows

As we advance, it retreats. We see we are now far into a dreamy cave, must be. Yet there seem to be almond trees, all around, and the wind lifts their leaves slightly. We want to go back, out of the bad stories, and yet they are beautiful stories, as we people them.

A recurring wave of/ how it came to be this way

Can knowledge be harmful? How about a mandate? They are bringing the plants back, one by one, in the interstices of heaven, earth, and today.

Quiet as it's Kept

If ever deception is annihilated you must look in that direction or you will turn into a pillar of salt

And that absent-minded thrill/disintegration could cost you the pilgrim and her deceptively dumb prayer wherein the spell of merriment is cast as a parody of despair and she is either, mime, that is, her hat is full of leaves and a cactus in the pattern of oasis you will look for it as if delivered by your blindness to its rippling visions which collapse when you look in their direction, pretending ocean, tidal roam

And in innocent delight at that stratagem, they voyaged on toward the Sirens

A tangle of blind eagles expelled from paradise by the crows who tore into them hoping for salt, shore pilgrims, even heaven is a dumb spell playing dumb as deception was annihilated when you turned into some

Absent-minded disintegration cross off the pilgrim off the cross if ever there is... the robbers had bound us and here we lay close to the captain's fire, whipping ourselves into counterspells against bad infinity, fantasies of some knot in the master's whiplash

A Tangled Liberation ( Freedom is nappy at the roots)

'If you shoot a arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you'

Something unfinished among the descendants

In this ambiguous vessel, this ambiguous vehicle: boat/train/bus/tavern, there's a jukebox

Trueblood's Blues Drive the Blues Away

Oh, Strange (Occasional Problems at the Frontier)

The parrot outlives you

Looking for roosters instead. It got too early to believe in speech yesterday so I waited. Some say that ain't productive so I watched them staring into the parent for a truce you get the barricade of being too loved to be a product. You get free of your own bloody commodification. What am I then? A kid again. Jumping geese in the radio station paddling toward their function on wings from a basket of capital ink... the bottom of a contract, is love back... is it really back to the bottom of a contract. Lines and the addicts who climb in them for restoration or a train belle.

If you're unsure of the difference between echo and delay the parrot outlives you that way, to make sure, to be shore to your trauma the calibre of joy, calm alarm, carnal, as in the tarnish of rank as in the flesh of a smile living on a farm scene somewhere dopey pretending to be a parrot and telling you where it's at in the bow and in the arrow, where the cold turns up toward a swarm of reversals and poker faced hoes get uncomfortable and show it. Their frenzy tells you so, that forgetting for them is the only accurate revolution. A real two-way self-negating self-outliving amnesia parrot thinking you back into your first words and wards while you wait for it to stage itself and some say it ain't productive but you don't care cause your absence is in the barricade of being too loved and accurate and puts the color back in yesterday, while he waits for you.. a swarm of dawns, a flock of restless noons. A kettle of slow-motion moonships rolling off the crucifix.

Cinema Mugging

She decided to win the movie.

Because she made no attempt to justify her decision, she got her way

Shut-in scholarship winning machine and mercenary, cleaning up the parody with some kinda future glare, failing at the parody with every kinda clean-up terror that was actually exhilarating and he was getting boring otherwise, like a pact that lost its shake, its tremble I mean, he no longer made her tremble the way she made him, mumble about the pretense--tender the hope he had for what was theirs together, unconditional hope for the parachute on earth. It got all heedless and daring between them, it got like the good greed, justice, like the extra goods breeding new services in us, consumption, bent needs, dyed flowers wilting in cracked vascular. Aw shucks, these are them, pastel magnolias wrapped in plastic, smudged of the belt they dragged us off, red-assed, rump shaker bumping, maraca off ebay buying, me-trine, he watches intently. Don't be Samson, don't be Delilah either. Love someone. Wear the parody like a bundle of money in a pimp's golden bib or his whore's heal or bra where she keeps reeling and softening and clinging to hoods and his situation is waste of a mess without her.

Because he made no attempt to justify it, he got her back, their words loomed the fabric of daggers together steady enough to pluck the careless between rituals into a tour of the sure thing. Don't be like us, don't be the anarchy that silences each category with an ensemble...hush now, don't explain, time, for another minute at least,

Strip Club

Nightclub

Artemis '83

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty