Against objectivity

Some notes on the frontier that invades you for singing

To the Race Industry in Crisis

Tell us again about how

the horse is alright.

Okay.



I used the trappings of Kabuki theatre, mime technique, fringe New York, a British view of American street energy, meticulous carelessness, and not needing you

To look like my name, land free and (the home of the bravery, recess for the slave god, and take it all over to the bottle, especially the people living for the bottle who found jesus and I'm hoping he gets lost again in the crowd at my show so he can finally have some time to be himself and have a drink

Invent us a no-name Jazz messiah who boasts on the climb and country enough to know about the divine slowness of perfection and how the end of distractions is a weapon we'll use on city one day. Now what

I'm not part of rock and roll, I have my own identity

Just beyond. Just after. Just before. Just faster Have you just as fooled as you have me gold grilled and drooling with seizure from your notion I'm yours when I work-for-hire on some songs to get out of the yard. Now we've dug up those contracts and won all the lawsuits and all you have is awe, shoot, and them niggers,

why'd you do it

I used to hear all your forbidden laughter about how genius and regal we are in private but there's a market for savage until everything went public all of a sudden it's not funny

(Can we cheer. Okay)

Drunk women in a rum shop

The light of the world (that's my favorite)

When everything like twilight in the tropics balances and trembles on its own pivot

The outlaw appeal

of a formerly banned fruit

The Origin of Gentle Rain

A phone is about to ring inside
I rush home and the door is you coughing up my new blood like a cluttered dimension, I shrug, unacceptable
big hug, long hug, hallmark cards in the rubble of us
not quite remote enough to be bohemia but we go far and it seems so long
There are still VCRs where we are, nestled inside-out the treason of a conk and curl, coughing us up as stuttering magnets
I don't want much stuff but I want everything
to come down and kiss me on the palm so tenderly it's almost violent
and unrelenting
we're both too shy to step outside this feeling, feeling this happy in the open makes us both feel dumb
and suspicious like that one spread umbrella on the street and the friendly ghost beneath it, afraid something good might happen

Personality Test

I was led to my horse, but I was still very weak. I saw the slender animal quivering with the fever of life. That is not my horse I said, when the innkeeper led a horse up to me every morning. Your horse was the only horse in our stables last night, the innkeeper said, and looked at me, smiling, defiantly smiling. No, I said, that is not my horse. As his saddlebag slid from my shoulder. I turned and went upstairs into the room I had just left
--

Terrible. A horse at night. Standing hitched alone in the still street and whinnying as if some sad nude astride him had gripped hot legs on him and sung a sweet high hungry single syllable.

--

Someone notes, how they don't paint the horse as well as the rider, in moments of transition, and the mood of it is thwarted on purpose. It's that injustice that makes them compatible. It's their inability to recognize one another that keeps them meeting again and again as if for the first time

Djbot Baghostus's Son

Reece said

through Hortense's mouth

I'm researching the creation of wealth but

I keep loosing my way once it comes to exchange

'all that's left is this open seriality of terminals'

and water that I hear but can't see.

Telling (the first rite of spring)

Do you do voodoo too

(he asked me on our second date)

While I warmed my palm over the flame

Next thing we knew I was moaning in the hotel elevator, pressing his ring to my folktale/heart--

the price of fame


--

Because they try too hard to be luxury

It's easy to spot imitations of me

They cop obnoxious purses

behave in knots of symmetrical enthusiasm,

and still wear tight jeans,

forgetting why secrets are good hygiene.

It's okay with me, I'll win the way I've always done,

by being gone when they come

but he feels differently

crumples it into scripted upheaval or becomes an imitation of himself

to numb the mania

--

The next morning the New York Electric Street Music rises to the tenth floor

and the truth is important.

I already adore you-- like we've done this before

You wouldn't put pins in me, would you, you wouldn't believe in me so much I exceed you and the excess becomes a wound I dress in fancy dresses with no wrinkles

--

Plus, you know I'm way ahead of you in the magic. I don't even need to practice anymore.

How could we have heard the sound of justice called in by the trauma if it hadn't been improvised by me, to improve us

( and I also thought, I can do the... that you do, easy/frontin' niggas give me heebie jeebies, I am hoodoo, believe me, our myth is our hygiene and a secret blinded by its own truth)

I answered his question absent-mindedly.. Yes, sometimes I do, but I don't call it that. If you call it by its salvation/name, it hides like a deranged animal. Can't we just call this Flying Home

Equinox Stomp ( a liberating cascade of breakdowns)

Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Break on down, do the boogaloo, make like a penguin, then--

what happened?

Preternatural cheerfulness? A broken claim to connection?

Japanese paper sleeve edition?

Not in a dismissive way, but intentionally.

A sudden declaration of war in the New/ark

What happend. What happend.

War. War.


Don't fight the feeling

The antique blacks are so rare. Captivity parody.

To the masters of the diva stare-down

supporters of Jamie Foxx line of platinum wigs.

the Ray Charles line of shade

Mumbling deejays who know all the words by heart

Startled groupies who know all the hearts by word

Part-time wifeys who don't give a fuck

Riot inciters setting off the truck alarm, car alarm, pharmacy alarm

practically in slow-motion cause we are our own heroes

And some of us are so charming we get bored with it

break it down to one question

May we be acceptable in our own sight

I get a panicky sense that the balance

has already tipped
and I will never again feel free
to pass myself off as a have-not

Counterspells Against Bad Infinity (commercial break)

Everything is bugged (conspiracy is our baggage)

The machine tears speech into pieces,

The way you wanted it, imperfect to be real

Witches, warlocks, computer chips, microchips, and you

The way I wanted it, too perfect too be real

deep, crazy, supernatural bugged out funk stuff

Wear your leather cape, I'll wear my untraceableness, the place is indifferent to us as we've become the place the machine tears us into the safest pieces there is




And we are clear.

Found Poem

I heard that these guys are more iced up than crystal castles, we talkin ice, meth, K, roids, tranq, heroin, tabs, speed, coke, lex, you name it, it's in their system... so seriously dripped is this track, I listened to it about 50 times dancing in my room like Barack Obama dances on the Ellen show, all smooth and chilled out, icing back in the majesty of it all... daaaamn it's got me swingin' something savage. this UK duo is pure prophetic optical inducing brilliance...Mount Kimbie, I heart you

The word was out

Against Barbra Walters (Rapper's Delight)

Everything happens. In other words, clipped wings and the banter of mechanics trying to fix a perfect machine for selling back in the panic-ridden vernacular of supply and demand, back when a division of labor could make a man hold in tantrums and keep his bladder Hennessy black and back when a leopard at Andrew Hill practice

hunts for my attention in his arthritic taste for guts and grace, craves its eager unwillingness, savors its willful glee, keeps me believing

in the worrisome pretensions of his understanding of how the engine runs on hunting rhythms and when I act trapped in my own stereophonic running, that it's a come-back. The outlaw that guarantees the law. An enforced misunderstanding. A mistress thing. The art of addressing and distracting at the same time. Bambi pops out of the woods in trampled ink. Everybody's on the lamb. The mundane disaster that talking is ramps the anchor into a frenzy and the story comes to be about a land in which your personae escape from you, jazz goes to the museum, rap goes mainstream, the women go plain or hoe and no in-between besides in the movies, the ones made in Sweden

and the near-rhyme of their missions with their machines. Don't let 'em into a banquet or player haters ball, they'll eat everything and leave crying. They want appliances in a way I don't know how, so-primal. I'm so primal it mechanises me, turns me into my chanting I'm too pure for you though, and the silence between glances that lingers as if to plea, but I need you closer

Someone said they saw you

being chased by a boy. I said, we were all chasing each other, and I beat everybody, and everybody beat me, it was a tremendous day. And I got home



When a rapper jumps into a beat, he adds his own... Sometimes he stays in the pocket of the beat and the rhymes land on the square so that beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces it into multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch.

Sunrise in Outerspace

How we stay true

to a future that already happened.



'

How to spiritualize a craving

An old black habit

We were afraid of becoming too much like ourselves, or wait, should I act unsure and ask him, were we afraid of becoming too much like ourselves? Worried about wearing out the trope of authenticity. Can that be a trope? Sure it can, just look at Oprah. Yuck. Don't bring her up. She's how we got into all this trouble and fear of becoming ourselves. She's shorthand for the battle hymn of the republic. I'm not afraid anymore. Of self-recognition in your wayward ass-- We're restless people, we want more and less at the same time. Satisfaction is the first sign of a problem. It's a kind of dilirium mumbling instructions to itself for how to maintain. Just... just... pretend if you gotta, run in place, mend the hidden with the obvious, find a way to keep your magic without disappearing acts. And as soon as you master it, disappear, move forward toward its myth—

To fall out of love with you, I'd have to fall out of love with myself, he said, and I'm working on it

I'm a fugitive, you're a fugitive

We're sitting here in Algeria on a very sunny day.

My name is Eldridge Cleaver/Timothy Leary...

And we're discussing the drug culture and the American Revolution

But we're also dealing with image/how to be very
specific about our generalizations

\

Against Fussyness

I don't believe in pre-fabricated thoughts, but the argument continues to be that you created me out of your own fantasies. Adversity was one of your fantasies, about true love, about truth in general (the shadow-world, the heirloom seed that makes girlhood and womanhood inseparable and mutually regressive), a knuckle-headed prerequisite I helplessly meet for you. But you heard me, despite the collateral damage, my father's rich and my mother's good looking, I've been up against miracle after miracle and my heaviest burdens begin in your fantasy where I was created, situated like a doll-in-a-lens, stuck upright on a perfectly made bed after a bland nightmare about me and you taking over the radio and the ban on torch songs and the ban on ballads and the smeared red lipstick on gospel singers in drab florals, house shoes and slouch socks, and their disapproval of the blues, a banner on that mood reading jah no dead. I don't know what's left of your fantasy, it imposes itself by stealth and greed, panics when I see it coming, but the best preparation for being a vessel is to not be too prepared in any direction. I hope. Woke up feeling incandescent and approachable, turned on the radio, and listened sleepily as the host called Crispus Attucks 'an anonymous black man who got famous for dying.' That was a drag to hear first thing in the morning, just when I thought the revolution was (about) growing accustomed to living forever. The segment was called 'why I am no longer a black poet.' I might have mixed something up, heard it all wrong. Or maybe bravery negates bravery. Or fame is the number one killer of the souls of black folk. Or maybe anonymity is, the number one fantasy of any soul free enough to create me, the ransom note on my back to the stage at Miles practice. The stack of Velvet Underground albums in the corner collecting numbness so I don't have to. Our satellite cactus as alive in despair as in ecstasy, creates the effect of a voice walking around lost in eden where they say they heard a voice walking and ran after it, got trapped in this song

Fractals from Black Africa

Now that there are children, the secrets are fastened. We safely feign the misunderstanding built into naturalness again, and the wisdom, the fearlessness, the ruthless decency. It's all very obvious and private. Nihilistic tenderness gets the better of pride. It's the rising and fiddlers in a single file line auditioning for Off/Minor. Off Minor is a jazz standard by Thelonious Monk. Monk is the kind of child I mean, we're friends in the wild invisible and we hang out there and think about souls in silence together. We let our ignorance bind us in liberation (for chimes, for bells, for triangle) which is discipline, and the equation struts alongs the ivory (though it's actually tiptoeing but black people know the key to a cautious strut, showy modest, make the fear part of the style, improvise hesitation into the plan, don't get grotesque and snap on the beat). Anyhow, when the kids grow up they tell us what happened while we were hiding in them and we nod our heads in shame and accomplishment and the ribbon riding my balloon up to its hiding place on your ceiling got caught in a bandit's hand on the way there. Man, I'm addicted to truth, it's fucked up, let me go, hints the ribbon. Tell me the one about Stevie Wonder and drunk drivers again. (It was all commercials and lifestyle shit except when you can tell it wasn't and shout I am authentic from the top of an hallucination). Tell me the one about the time mom got that DUI driving back from dad's concert. The time all those flowers arrived but her eye was sealed shut by that buttery fist of his. She couldn't even see the feeling. All these accidents add up to some kinda double hipness, you know, some kinda ridiculous piety in the key of life that jives birth by being it again and again 'til it's dizzy as Monk and me shuffling around in circles on stage when they don't notice, that's his favorite part

Simple Wins a Grammy

I want to thank the movies

I know that sounds general, but it's very real to me.

For still being disobedient

For teaching me that the world is controlled by an impossibility

For teaching me to be impossible

For teaching the impossible to disguise itself as protocol, proto-cosmos, slow songs, the god in machine, god imagining himself so well he vanishes. When you look up again he's sitting in a concrete yard lifting weights and the bible is his ash tray, ashes redacting scripture til the phrases are blank and lazy eared, and the time they tell goes by like stray guilt, it's looking for a home or a channel or even a random crime to fold into and all it finds is the picture show music on the side of the bed wrestling with its own cheer for a plot. I couldn't really put my fingers on it, but it was a beat, it was a beat! It's so hard out there for a pimp. It's so fun to be black and impossible

I thought everything

was disappearing.

(the silver leader/refugee in the calm cool fiat of sooner or later, the two yawning alleys of your eyes staring me in the affair)

That's the vibration that thrills me
Funny how affection fills me

Too Colloquial (too formal)

You should have seen it, 30 limousines filled with niggas driving into the sunset

I wanted to find them (niggas) one by one

There's the one who went on to be like the reed, tough, but supple enough to not be broken

Whoever you are holding me in your hand, I give you fair warning, I am not what you supposed but far different he would scream as
he saved the earth from scorching by shooting nine of the ten suns (became a combination of several myths and legends)

The suns fell to the earth as swans and crows who feigned madness in order to survive and keep the lineage unbroken

There's the one who makes me so happy sometimes it gets hostile and I shout: man is something to be overcome, what have you done to overcome him, you concentric hearted beast, what have you done,
you're a land mine on the inside, your insides are being devastated, and torn up, because you keep all these lies

Silence.

If your dream featured a game of horseshoes