Dear Dad,
Sometimes I think we confuse re-inventing love with re-inventing death and I think maybe we even like it and need it that way. Maybe we court the kind of confusion that regulates us into our subtler uses, like, you go be the showmanship and I'll be your hippest reason, your once-in-a-resurrection slant rhyme with yourself and helicopter glance/glee, ghetto bird so loud I can finally sleep. It gets paratactic like that like when the sun is up and we get lit. No, the sun is really up. At last. And we lit. Uppity Sun. Up there in that caricature of sky like a lucky number or verse stuck in Rainman's perfect child/ mind.
When Amiri died I wept for 2 weeks, off and on, and I keep on shedding some kind of amplitude for him until it feels like he's still here warning me from within you got to be a spirit, you can't be no ghost, and don't ever let anyone break you, he promised me one night at Blue Note after a Jon Faddis show, before a whisky and coke. You and Faddis share a birthday, and Jon is O's uncle, it all feels related like a blatant mend in the safest someday, my prince is them.
I was visiting LA for the month when it happened, and on my daily, glorious runs among the smog and griffins, spandex and the moonlight's but a spotlight— I wept as I ran and listened to him read under gigantic headphones, and I listened to Theo Parrish and Miles and Amiri reading to me and cried and ran. Sometimes chanting Witness the Fitness!
Even mourning feels like a form of vanity in Los Angeles and even realer and rawer for it the way all acts are repetitive and eventually become what they set out to only pretend. But the stranger doesn't even pretend. That's how this year began, like a blunt stranger offering up the weightless baton I've always been waiting to patiently grasp, like its pretense of tumbling into the bluff of me rescued by a sense that enough is not/never enough. It is not. A tainted empathy flailing in the torch that will not stop burning. A new course in tone science, alliances and their obstacles.
You and Amiri were born in the same year and maybe it feels like you've died again, and therefore returned again, and the domain of everything feels clenched in the sudden purgatory between revel and rival (volition and listening), between why now and now's always the time. And I call the fact that I slept with that married guy that same month, that same guy I asked you to help me transcend and banish, I guess I call that a relapse or some kind of reach toward what you and Amiri represent to me but in a new form, trying to replace the heroic with the erotic, failing, triumphantly. And now what? I'm a fugitive? You're a fugitive? It's as if three men died and I could only cry for one. It's as if I am a miracle and I can only perform myself for you and them,
Only the impossible happens. It's as if we're all shepherds in love but mumbling the announcement between sobs and laughter and a deaf flock, not sure which is more accurate of love/at last. We argue over which window to jettison the television from, all those stories below, all told or untold but alive like falling into place, and when it crashes we disagree over which wire caused the burn. In the silence we're left with, I whisper I hold no grudge and it sounds like a lie even though it's a lie. Damn. The uncontrollable urge to dance began with standing still in that sounding. And it's the Olympics. I don't watch. It's the limp way competition commits loyalty to satisfy the loyalty it ruins. Hmph. I'm in this beautiful, I've-seen-it-all and nothing at all/is real/are you real?, mood. Miles is still on and all of you have come back to life in me which is difficult like a happy ending with no specific event to call happy and endlessly. The happy thing is no where to be seen and how safe that has made it. How protected. How reckless. How diligent. How lazy. That dream again.
Today is the day that you give you heart to... Dad, I want you to hold onto your heart now, what if you win your own heart back? Close the door behind those sad cops and come back inside and stay for a while like always. I don't blame you for saving our lives even though some days we forget what to do with them, pagans that we've faithfully been, imagining is remembering. I'm finding more and more that no body knows anything about the Bible anyways. And I think everyone's alive/again. I had to like, open the bruise up, and let some of the Blues blood come out, to show them.
It's only love that gets us through,
Harmony
