Friday, February 7, 2014

Black American Psycho (notes)

I'm never sober and you neither// go to grammar for sweetness or to be broken again/\ winter wore on me like a local kind of common ennui is a word I like to use for everything and entertaining/I remember the tender age when I thought making sense was important like if I could just tell my story my story will make sense and how I'm still that age now and how the adverbs break to be emphatic like a perfect woman contortionist I couldn't dance for another (groove is in the heart) and I learned how to swim by drowning and how to sin by winning just like you, nigga/

Damn if I'm not a telegram again, a thing to be said aloud and silently too, a kind of living utterance and so utterly all the jealous ones line up to tell me what I mean, and all the stops make broad fantasies like the widest street in the movie with the narrowest red wing of a car and Miles at the wheel charging himself with a kind of theft you only wish we would look more tortured when we ride off into the sunset
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On the day you realize that the beast in you is alive again, having survived all of the cocktail parties and graduations, the advanced degrees and all of your artistic talent and all of your obsession with style and the Italian kind and the French kind and the African kind and the highball and the always be mine and the wise kind of malice that acts all friendly and gracious just to get to the way you act and break it and put it back together as the kind of desire to be who you are that we call blackness and are and as if all of our pathologies stem from love and maybe I'm finally blind enough to trust that again and every time I think a wimpy thought which I never do I want to apologize to my father and Amiri and hop on a plane to someplace where thinking and being are the same exact///change/  whatever it is that collapses as an attribution or rebirth when you learn with casual poise to disagree with yourself and become the classic I always knew you had it in you oh no you didn't diva of so what and I'd do it again too. When did it become ruthless to be yourself, suddenly I'm hugging Kanye West with wet eagles in my eyes and a tribal march barges onto the radio in token whispers. This wouldn't be the first time we re-invented god so many times he watches out like a nervous shepherd for the one runaway, the one even everyone can believe in