The Unseen Companion

Setting an extra place at the table's little trouble, little braided notion of almost, where the bass comes in and its acrylic eventually. The way we twirl into fantasy when it gets hard to speak is what makes us professional hamsters, artists—mercy mercy me, oh things ain't what. Zeus, jesus, or whoever saves us

Talk about strutting. We invented entire dreams around the walk off. Imma throw confetti and chalk at the judges who love me most and sprint backstage with my eyes closed, give the producer a blow job in the wings, cope with the tabloids by singing myself sloppy aesop, only the fables that end in my favor or never, and I'll go home happy and blind, the next night too. Feeling so nice we had to make it twice. And trying to learn how to segue from the absurd to the literal with no pause is a lifestyle. Clarice Lispector. Miles to go. Rubric for quest for light. Annotated silence at the height of its sigh. That's the part where she would bring up her driver or the way the beach feels on winter skin, and turn the sand into quartz, and turn the quartz into her father, and turn her father inside out, find a wave of Porsches there, a whole parking lot full of his cars with keys in the ignition and talk about the significance of the color red in black and white, how you can still tell those cars are red. How communication transcends its own will to hide and then all the cars drive themselves into the only oblivion they ever felt and the commercial glows finite, loadstar, ting of silver on gold grills in the marshall law and lawless background, softer. A greedy sound the word extra makes, a gritty, pleasing sound it tugs out of us and traps in possibility.

At forever (At least forever)

Synthesize yourself

I'm finally insane, he thought. What freedom. Hellbent, hell kneeled and gallant, mangy hello meant well and did even

   better at itself to mutter well that's a fine how-do-you-do. Superstition stemming from too much leisure so had a few illegitimate children and a weary sense of duty on the rim of exile, exhilaration. Such style it still seems famous of him, yellow blindin dame and fame's fine and an inside game with no simile to reduce it to freedom again. But I loved the man more than the manner/ plain, went pedantic and mugged myself for the prize I had already won or blamed, enacting that mild brand of disbelief like first snow to last country. Guilt made him hungry and gregarious. Which was an outrage. Which I cherished with my entire absence so we could disagree on cue. I wonder what it feels like/ my style is changing. Delightedly. Apache pain. Before I fell for fathers and now my faith is clogged with them merciless motherfukers who went sane and source, and now. The black man who re-invented Slavery as a club and then a concert series, never imagined all the women in labor behind the bar, in the the taxi on the way to the bathtub and the natural way back to the far away way we were

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Some violently passive fake the radio acts even when it's off. Since when did change become a threat. Since when did music

Cocaine and Karma

We thought Sun Ra was trying to be weird, but he was just talking like his hometown.

What about love

Between conduct and consciousness (fragments)

the poem is where you stop to breathe

Another other, easy

The love is where you start to breathe

Another other, easy

Together, a black mythology going back and forth in a living history of space as well as time as well the twin minds, of space, as well as time

Remember when they said revolution is the main theme in the world today 

Sovereignty got vague, vite! (vital) too calm to pray for what's already this way or that way

So far

I am in love with you, are you in love with the future

Immortal in C

So in a universe where man is trying to take over the divine prerogatives, but is unable to control even himself, we need to develop a new relationship with time. 

Conversation Piece (2) Sketches of Easy

Love is a light a lot like loss except 

When I wake up and the blue light is red or in the pink of flesh, I forgot you had flesh, eyes that draw affection right out of my lie. That part gets me high. 

Ever notice. How the word niggas sounds like negotiations again when you're listening to the news over bended jazz. An optional condition, chosen and then transcended and the chosen again like that love I mention. The only way. Is to ask. Do these men swing? Does anything? And then I picture trees and nooses around ebony necks and next to a piece of fruit a wail, a croon, a reprieve too real to prove, my southern trees loose as bodies on stage 

Laughing like ballads and the throat constricts to hold or withhold the light it needs to live through you. And what is. The calmness of objective life? Worth, afterall. When I have so many opinions that pine to begin. To begin pining after my own will, is that the shining incidence of oneness they fake about in the sunniest way. Lunging east in a dazed quest for easy. But my insistent affection for my own thoughts is song again, so happiness is that easy in the center. No offense to the fringe made up of, whatever's there. In the sunny needs. Sin/ sun, soon/ sun, a trap of associations and how to escape through a hunch but not punish the spaces between you and them with memory

Dear Harmony, my father wrote. When I met your mother I had just had an aneurism in my throat and could hardly speak the social language. The doctors thought it was emotional. Somatic wine and roses. Everything is emotional, but the blood knows better, knows when to close the voice and open the soul. And everything is gold to get through the luck of pauses and the soul continues with no caution against you. The spirit refuses to pause. I could still breathe but I couldn't talk or sing for a while. And the beautiful shadows of winged things hung vivid and invisible like toy ideas on the slope of my feeling free. We learned total freedom/ is not the answer. We made you out of the news I gained in that hush then, before they named what it was to heal it to what it is. We blamed your beauty on the trouble. But it was actually on the thrill. Of achieving serenity in a clench if irony, radiant irony, irony that disperses to become such sincere life. 

You shouldn't let poets lie to you

Chaque Fois

This one is true, this one is real

Trust became so much like expectation before it disappeared. Subtle and deranged. Tattered nuances of luck and clues that wish they were you or pucker like a blues in the shopwindow, for sale, for show. Dear Harmony, my father wrote.  Play the notes in your heart until all you hear is in harmony with them. Be yourself, because you can. That's where your name comes from. The mumbled intensity of even the most nimble heart will teach a dead man to breathe again. You always wanted to know what my own father was like. I always did too. Teach that man to breathe again. Seeds are romantic, but the fruit.

Both Armies Pray for Victory

Integrity is finally.                                                              He can't really. Tell the difference.

                            

                                 Between a vision and a dream.                                                                  For that matter.  

                He can't tell the difference between a dream and a nightmare.             I'm supposed to be 

                                                                                                                  in love with him 

because he's a lot. Like my father. But it's no secret I'm in love with him because he's a lot like me.   The anxiety that comes over me when I'm calm about it must be my survival instinct. In tact. The weapons we hide in the grass hatch under full moon assonance and soon everybody's alive again. Exactly like you.     And then it goes: Both armies pray for (a) victory exactly like you. You're not vain to imagine it that way. Or paranoid. Or country. Haven. Even then. And everyone wins bare feet in the minute between green and happening, just running through that grass as if the cinema, clasping a mug of caffeine and reasons why it's always been difficult to introduce the heroes back to the ideas of themselves and expect an integrated person to well up in his eyes. But didn't I. 

Small Black Church

It's about time for the cooperative jazz club, etc, to open. Musicians should get together and "do it ourselves." It would be a revolution on the Jazz scene, not to mention the whole entertainment economy. Musicians playing for themselves, and playing exactly what they want to. That would be the millennium for real. But there are very few people strong enough to see such a program through. -- Amiri Baraka 1964

Completely Original Fantasies

Self and Satellites

Plantation Tour

I was tiptoeing across the hearts of my heroes—myself, runaways and clear-eyed stayers. A farce of raids and jeers and ghosts are played out/everywhere like the urge to kneel at sundown.

And what's a stayer again? In this day and age. And everything. Everything is so easy to say these days like sincerity is a step ahead of reason and it must mean the ego and the eagle keep interlocking in a blank field until even a white flag is too dark to feel. And avoidance is so corrosive we fit our heels in the mud and roses bloom up of them. I pitched the idea to Jerry Seinfeld in a dream. A series about a black family running a plantation tour business in the invisible green or they don't know they're there even as they're dreaming it and in that same dream we ate a meal of mangoes, basil, and mint yogurt, and then washed the dishes side by side with tears in our eyes and grins on our faces. Smiles not grins. It must have been. Really strange. To be a slave and love life this much. We thought to ourselves in silent unison.

13 Ways of Hiding from a Black Man

You punch me in the face and blue flowers bloom.

Use the word negro until it looks through you like a mirror reflecting a ghost

Get close enough to disappear into the vanishing sound of your own nearness/ behind the

curtain, a spotlight

Hail a cab on 5th

Hail a cab in a movie/ stilettos under fake snowflakes

I loves you, Porgy (don’t let him…

Fuck the police. On the count of three say, fuck…

Pimps ain’t shit, neither (plantation tours for sale)

(Please don’t) Sign on the dotted line /that classic lean of yours/and mine

Beneath this mask I’m even happier

You punch me in the face and 9 radios play, silence

And like mimes rolling dice with chalk on their lips and cool-aged smiles and you blend in

with the dice, a scoop of chance in black and

A Bojangles-flashback-having diva modest and impossibly alert until

Heroine pours out of Miles’ trumpet and into nine forms, a child

You punch him in the face and twin muses bloom, talk about infinity like a promise and fluke and


Become one

A wife is a slave

Logical Understanding of the Occult

Will and Idea (Dream Consciousness)

Ah, that's the elephants. And it's wonderful. To see the elephants holding up the world.

Impressions

As if language is a machine for creating doubt and I broke it without violating it, now the words are beyond infinite. He writes me illegible letters, delirious as bird songs in the ghetto while he shoves his opinions off the grid like a rescue mission for offense. Not sure if I like it but it's better than the classic wow, you have a lot of ideas  I get with din of basketball games and stale beer, pretending, I don't even entertain that shit, but hypothetically, everything I've thought about doing I've done already and there's no ennui from it as the tossing wind stills with a sudden alertness or to ask how about now we blow them away for real. Nature, the great interrogator gatekeeper whatever you say, say you mean like a light skirt when the train comes in, cinematic glimpse of a magical and hip ass that really matters to itself enough to understand the ratio of exposure to disappearance and go on hiding in the heart of a child. The envelopes are always smudged by tears and the casual dirt good men live on and I never open them.

The truth about dirty records

Ain't no such thing

13 Ways of Being your Immortality, the 11th way, For all we know

I'm still having epiphanies. And as we're talking about the next frontier the only god we deserve is here, remember? On the edge of the bed praying for his own return over

and over, I remind him how I'm good enough to be a lie, the kind you visualize yourself telling yourself on an especially healthy day, I'm gonna wake up and run the whole way... break away from the wolves I invent to hide from and not even cry about it when I realize I'm the sun, too bright for my own eyes sometimes

My nigga has a solar tragedy that has nothing to do with mists or animals, not even chauvinism can cloak his self-hate in nobody, the play begins— so articulate he can say nothing, so black he can brag about it and still feel inadequate compared to a paper doll, some days. Some daze that was, my hero has nigga tragedy that has nothing to do with sun, so yellow some days I'm all no relation and slowly we unclasp hands in the break. Humming Monk's When it's dark on the Delta with no level of shrug in our mellow tone, poised mellow, start again from the top mellow, 5, 6, 7, 8 and the dancers stand still but the mirror travels with the music like a servant becoming a rival

          Am I hallucinating or making sense of things, my lucid king, my bright coil of messiah—and every time I buy a new thing I see a commercial for it just after. Just as you were telling me I have a beautiful smile, the sign on the Gato Negro bottle became Good Negro. The singles in the other ad became sinner. Ignorance disappears into the adventure. Chin, up sinner, I can prove it. Just don't believe everything you think. And quit making promises while the music's on. Conquerors, sometimes, are melancholy, a price for all that vainglory, vainglory. Not this time.