Wednesday, March 7, 2012

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