Dice

A secret so polite it's rude could land on you in groovy dots and acoustic mirrors and not stop there, winner, winning numbers bursting with murmur like the clumsy broken heart of a video on its squeaky fast forward on the grid of infinite extension-- You must know/ something about me/ Assume I had a nice beautiful background, mother and father and all that shit, whole lotta bread/ Know how to be right and wrong at the same time like a nice beautiful background mother and father whole lotta bread and water is all that's left of god is risk and water/ and how I don't worry anymore about if you had a nice beautiful background, mother and father and all that shit, whole lotta dread wells up in me when I hear my people praying in a ritual I don't understand. For all I know they're requesting their own troubles. Resist the simile. It's too easy to be like them and lost In my heart. I'm sure of it. That I can't give this up a note but I did call it closer and closer to all that's left of god. I love the good uncomfortable days when life is simple and real

Discrete Series

The Other and the One

The man who could see through fog

Constitutional

There is a trace of what remains to be discovered, a topic, a path I am trying to take that moves through a shudder I can never escape when gazing

Against Similac

In my country there is mountain (maintaining someone) In my country there is a river (you won't ever drown from becoming) Night limns the mountain. Hunger goes down the river. We say hunger because desire is full of endless distances. Come with me

The Three Sounds

His fame makes: Silence (sunshine) sunshine! Son, shine.. shadows on the vein Don't sign on the dotted... What is a minority, is it plural or my behavior in lines and who said patience is a virtue so I can find him and make him wait... wait for it.. Don't sign your real name

Free Floating Dolly

Spike Lee / The Dolly Shot from Richard Cruz on Vimeo.

Slant Rhyme for Mingus (The Needs of Natural Men)

Put away the Detroit ruin photography And all that Animi Christi shhhh..., please be unreasonable again so I can trust you and then say I do and maybe even mean it again I'm not sure who to please cause I really don't care again unless it's me, finally, a free floating dolly centered on the luxury of Indians in the Pampa or the consequence of luxury in the...What is a commons, is it plural, is it your momma so everything to the resonant power of a Fender Rhodes' I told you so, but if you don't know me by now you won't neva eva eva... What is an eve, is it before me, is she unreasonable like before so you can trust me and I'm yours again and you're thinking oh, she makes such sleek music from the hearts of space and timeless. And when the stray single dad with the erassure in his eyes can't even pray besides to Kraftwerk there is radiance in New York again and disgrace and what we're almost here for momentarily/ where are we...? See the section on seclusion and get out of your memory and America's need for Detroit to be ruined could tell us something about your mom's uncommon hips, a promised stereo in the cherished phonics of the shoulder cold in palm and Grace Paley's run on Coney Island that time was a lot like it finally will be for him when he'll be fine and rolling like a dime on his hypotenuse into the prudential phase-- neither way can you trust him more than your own sleepless epiphany to get you through to the west winds of truism and back to Detroit and a ban on the word important cause it ran out... Anyways, innocence. Earth's getting too fancy for the truth like a black and tan fantasy fugue its only body is a quivering prostitute on the rock until he touches it and the flutter fits him, he wears it for us, he's dressed for the cross and it fits him like no reason, I don't need no reason to love you

That Fierce Decorum (I came to hear my drummer play)

The Dancers Will Inherit the Party

Verbal Units Beyond the Utterance

Are like armed love, transcriptions of it take into account:
pause length
overlap
and where there's no gap(latching)

I immediately had to get a a drum instructor, a trumpet teacher, and a gun twirling coach
I always want there to be so much
elasticity as if that is the stillness

Thursdays at the Good Life

The Annual Flooding of the Nile

I'll do a pantomime to it, a silent solo, 24 bars, no sound, just, you know, gestures. Black Mirror Stages are different in a black context, no contest, something about previousness invades us and lets me speak like a child

Everybody-act-accordin-to-the-season-that-they're-born-in

And don't call it come-back in particular--
Just again and again brand new

Anyway, Innocence.

Digitally pacing the stage as its future and its past, a full body holograph
of Tupac Shakur
No more bad-dream music
No more second-tier reunions
Fidelity is diffident,
offensive, a new interstellar low-way
to say suspended animation and the sound of his gaze, Just Above my Head by James Baldwin, cinder and crystal always lies.
The trouble with all this healing is the scar is him, we meet again, anyway, innocence until the intelligence of our transcendence is more than completeness, the kind of lunging stillness that unites large numbers of people and makes us feel innocent, atomic. I wanna be at The Summit of the Americas with this history of more than completeness he blew me a fractured chorus I wanna be it. Smokey Robinson Cruso's, I'm Your Puppet, gets the tree right up close and inhales some lucky boulevard of Linden rut or triumph-- his ailments have been identified as paranoid schizophrenia and polysubtance dependance, though he no longer uses any substance regularly, that's because he doesn't have the funds. Anyway, innocence. The intelligence of our transcendence is more than completeness and the kind of lunging stillness that unites large numbers of people and makes us feel innocent. I wanna be at The Summit of the Americas, James Baldwin Just Above my Head, taking you everywhere you've led me

The boy who changed into a parrot

is spying on his own conversations
and acting like the sorry debris packed into silence
is a lung that can't breathe its own-- stumbling around in the chariot
I got a talkbird, I got a burden, I got him-- to say the words he didn't mean and take 'em back and say them again like I was church or the other woman

Niggas in Raincoats P. 1

And the ambivalence, as cylinder, as business gadget, how they peal with shine like casual microscopes and suggest the uncried tears of our fathers appear just in time in for our own to dry as diatribe. Fuck it. Pathos is bad for you. Mythos is dad to you, big papa, he blushes when you forgive him for being modest sometimes even though he gets dissed for it and approached like a bridge during rush hour--don't wanna talk about blackness any longer, wanna talk about proportions and what we're gonna wear to the store from now on and those men you call rappers weep in my arms, all seven of them at a time, all the time. Ever single person you meet, look at them like a golden, million dollar baby.

Fragments of the New Jerusalem

Brick chimneys and green composition roofs that allow the sun shine through
Significance was at its everyday level until the stucco strip mall wall with a shadow slanting across it started a hope
The magician began to work only when we turned down into that new suburb
How usually you meet your destiny on the road you're taking to avoid it
So far as this love/ego is concerned, transfiguration is proportional to distance
The nearer to my heart, the more divinely other/and
Time was uncovering another manifestation of eternal suchness
I'm not even sure what I mean anymore or what I've been trained for but openness and, I'm focused, man. On it like it's opposition or the street during a a riot-- there's a riot going on but the perpetrators are mimes their mime whores looking for the right words to hide at. I'm trying to remember which instrument I play, again, and forget
We started a far off joke and now it's local and low piano
smiling so hard there's no room to laugh and
fearless

Harbor beginnings and that other gleam

Never doubt me and you'll never be wrong, I wanted to admit, like a confession to the crime of an omnipotent alter ego brewing in the phrase so radiant and familiar I don't even know you anymore... I need a better friend. Myself. We're finally in love again, as if for the first time. His poems were so good I thought he was black. I painted him thus. He was. Til a google image search shattered all my myths again, as if for the first time. It doesn't make sense, how much I love my grandfather, there must be another world. In that world the time he told my mom to put me up for adoption to disentangle the bloodline from blackness, I wasn't listening from the future with a camera on my shins and no one deserves to be punished for shattering his own myths. Silence is a life sentence so we broke it so dashing-- when I came in all right and timeless like never doubt me and you'll never be wrong and he didn't. His love is so strong I think he's been black before. In a past life or everything. And all his life he's been an attic poet so quiet I had to admit if for him to disentangle the bloodline from the double time, I mean the two timing you have to do to keep faithful to the American Dream. In the most incredible photos we all look like toys

Making Scenes

Even your idols' adulthood is a squalling orphanage, phony display windows all over pretending whatever you're looking for--I won't be in their coop of ordinary theories and beer breath, gives me the chills just watching. Thou shalt not worship idols.

I make myself a list of chores oriented against it and loving you is on it adjacent leaving you-- nothing to prove is on it. It's always scandalous when it's right, renews me like an endless spool of magnetic tape I kept the sound of me crumpling the list-sheet to make a cushion in the morning raga I'm listening from with all my enraged serenity for the skipped phase jah punished you when you forgot time doesn't exist, only rhythm and change -- his famous, by now, come-back as this addiction to the rhythm we have, this purifying infection of a habit untamed by what doesn't exist--

Check the list for ascendants from the great getting up morning and name them how they seem, like orphans, mature out of fear, wise out of disgust for what it's really like. Check the so good it's bad column in the swarm, it's shrinking to here--me meeting me this savage/domestic with the cleanest kitchen in all of Manhattan and the most reclusive-to-be-universal mind, I mean really grimy and beautiful like the truth be whatever you're looking for at the time. I listened to the rest of the cassette, the roar of jets and shells mixed with the sounds of birds and bells, revving car engines, skin on skin. It was like a set-up, his music was. To set you up for disappointment in order to impress you. Irresistibly mundane. And it works for us. We long to practice humanity in a way that resonates as our own

Machiavelli as a Girl

Even your witches can't resist me, hunting the laugh out of gravity to gather my murmured, bitch, please

I've been thinking about the way some gay men speak, especially dancing, and certain blacks, that nasty irresistible decadence, really wondering

if oppression is a numb outburst of hoes when the money comes and those shoes in the window locate the toe fat like no house slipper ever slump into a course of ribbon and curses cause the cures hurt

Tricks spill out of their mouths for it and something classic happens

Lee Morgan and Grant Green, Search for the New Land, Stanley Clarke, I wanna play for you, Gino Vanelli, Blue Mitchell, it's rude to know so much, girl

I discover Personism by not sending you this one...

Nevermind, here it comes, alwaysmind, always body and soul

Sometimes the agitation of a jazz hymn is such a haven that my advice to losses/musicmen, is, stay agitated, the rest of the song is counting on you and can't get any higher on somber giddy, haunted, a dazzle of releases that won't get you pregnant or

Working for hire in the forest of motives we invented no where, a terrible pole, cold on her nipple like the green edge of blow

Plato's Symposium corrodes the space around your radio chivalry like a crackling mafia knuckle, next up, you

and your nickel bag of motivation, can't come in tonight. Whisper not.

--
Script for an abandoned set
--

Don’t talk about the whisper of ice on glass at the Vanguard and I won’t talk about your baby moms

(don’t front, I know about you, know about you)

Getting closer to jesus on the tip of our raspy speaker is a mellow guy with me on his arm

Picture of Josephine Baker, fortress

My one and only blind eagle, fortress

Defiance

Fortress

Don’t trip over my shadow and I won’t talk about where you landed in it, cracked this lantern into porches and like a traveling salesman

the ship has a size, prices. My wrist if your thumb is checking--the space between beats it catches me feeling if you don’t talk about building us that swing look up and I’m in it.

The adrenals are shaped like pyramids. Legs out for raid, in for persuasion. The ship has dances. Pushes us once backwards to start us on our journey up the fortress

His promises. Shocking but not pathetic

Fortess

The Okey 8000 series.

Huckleberry Finn is disappearing

Fortress

Hannah Arendt is disappearing

The sign read “divorce, $299,” where am I

Fortress.

It all vanishes, becomes your blurry talking head

Don’t talk about the half of our fathers you buried in those samples and I won’t

talk about the time I caught you walking out of the club with that muppet-looking white girl

eyes bulging when you saw me like I was a 5-0 flashlight.

Fortress.



I can’t get over that.

It was so exactly America that night

I forgot my mother's name that night as I screamed for it

Where am I

Roland Barthes is disappearing into his discourse.

There’s music. We can finally sing about it in the field

You should know

that the bridge collapsed
Rigorously un/captured
You can't capture it again
But we're the two panther's walking across it un/
scathed into one another's
phantom chords and armor. Slurs, clangs,
hush, there's more.
I hail a cab. You turn yellow and
slow down
faster. How do you figure, how do you figure

Dialog is a Home

The exact prototypes of dignity are advancing toward it on sparks

The Okeh Records

Gonzo Journalsim

We smile 'cause we are good people, probably

I think of myself as the cheerful type who pretends to be hurt to get to the true depth of things that interest me. Maybe. Not really.

I've even given that up lately with the stream of events going so fast and movingly. Maybe. Not really.

Read that Peyote which is Mescaline, is a lot like human adrenaline and that the results of psychological stress to the adrenal glands is Western blackness similar to a Mescaline trip on a molecular level. They call it schizophrenia in certain textbooks. Then Aldous Huxley went blind. Flashes of my sister tripping over and over her black side smiles

Chronic Joy

Ravishment. As if reality is innocence but innocence is vacant, bleeds the casual toxicity of our everyday machines seeing the presence of a color in a detached way and the lazy rake of reaping and sowing it into the break between me and the seen-said color with ease and a sailor, with red curtain knees. Don't be sad. Be the the color of it in a practice, for the exact neighborhood of muses you came to get at and resist, paint the house the technical sheer of 'words don't go here--' To be smooth you have to be repetitive so I'm choosing a new festival, of lights on water, a renaissance bouncing, empty package of Newports on the Metropolitan floor crumpled like the hand they were in making me cringe with delight and amnesty and ascent and glad it ain't me-- mint condition innocence is a real problem if you can't dismantle the agent and remain it, I'd give it back to you in a detached way but you can't handle that too free my mind is without it. At night you hide between the speakers and smoke something that makes me reel again, it aches at first, a crippling purity, then it phases into the safe neighborhood like a Doctor Dre lyric in the middle of the desert, leaving itself alone

Come get to this

The sin of endlessness made me stammer, hurry the felt tip like a chore, and perfect it-- cut it open like the forgiveness dialectic, sides that haven't met but get legible next to one another, (I don't but I did) majestic lambs with hot comb manners dangling from them like a purple hour, blandly roaming, hoping out of tune and sleep walking to Sizzler, delivering swift punishment to the hunger for the invention of buffets and majority, for the nation's way of glorifying uselessness and smooth adult contemporary radio stations, excess and casual Afros until Pharaoh can't go where he needs in himself. Now I'm speaking in marches and situations, in the ritual or cold shoulder to white guys with gold grills who wanted to lay their heads on my pillow in college, in the warm of a thousand yard stare held in the relay between the agreeable and the Chameleon Circuit, repeating it with a ripple grip until-- I just don't know, where there is to get to

The Metaphysics of America

An Egypt pageant's vernacular scattering ankhs and uncles' screams between the sheepishly poised claps of poppies on the Oz wind, flat notes, hasbeens, battered debutantes and we who love to be astonished hiding in opinions while humming the affinity of Miss Brown to you.

Angelic and a team of addicts pushing their fantasies against it, adamantly deaf to all the words left in our hearts, ready to bleed them and see them through the west's nexus of alphabets and let downs

Heroine, heroine, heroine, heroine... it lent him the rhythm of invisibility to be the drug he needs a personal, me, to get him high as the practical Apollo statue with bald knees, Showtime, tap down from the second balcony wearing a cane and white gloves and land in the splits. Make it look so good it's intrusive. Make it make your move for you. Be screaming. Be quiet