The stranger doesn't even pretend (2)

A hint of blackness applied to a white face released it from law   not just in minstrelsy but for the dream   feeding     mulatto  leader   in  a  pell-mell of   lost and   gained   difference.      So much of me is bound up   in just  indifference    that    the only recourse   is passion      the monastic excess of indifference   might   be   passion    a nasty   capacity for giving    great advice,  a romantic isolation    wherein I can finally write a story about black slaves whipping their so-called masters except the slaves are MLK and his space ghost familiars and they're at party he's hosting, candlelit and rose petals all over the pews, free bible upon entry     the tame absurdity  of   good vs.  evil is all over now, it's all over now.  He's hired a troupe of white prostitutes   to beat and fuck all through the night.    I read about it in black and white and wrote it back in color   how    everyone got   lucky   in one way or another   struck in beautiful figure eights until   his knuckles  were pale   and weightless    and who should the savior forgive first  when the war   is loose    in utopia        and they resemble  one another     have a covert dependency   on one another      shrug off the nerve to shrug it off    and    the   only boss    is guilt   sometimes     which is different  than remorse    having something to do with the ego's attachment   to the weight or weightlessness of the  experience     like a batch   of   ripe   hasbeens   the past       knows   sheer articulation is a kind of glory    comes back shouting  now I'm articulate!   Now I know what I mean! 

Let's talk about how everything is everything

The flagship metaphor so subtle and boring it jumps the spleen at 4 in the morning, for kicks, recreational criminal, the swollen third lung, thug lung, hurried lung    one that never loved the door slanted shut on a phony ditch  and rutted there with records (memories)   needy corners in a circular life    bright as iron in   the   ice    storm   bright as    earned forgetting    errand in the manner of pleasure         You have to be careful with iron supplements though, because they're acidic, and you might get more bonding than you actually    want           that    said     none but the   righteous    none     but the      like us?      that said     can   this   be reportorial   without being   linear   a motherhood in letters        that   said    when Tony Soprano  ran from the all-his-teeth having, coca cola slurping world war 3 veteran  black preacher   who's  son he was fixin to off    nevermind all that    what had he   seen in the soft dilemma of      irony  :    see the iron   in there    see the runner again,     the mineral  and the   dash         perhaps my Hatian Sicilian blood  struggles with how jazz was the    nigga mafia   and    now   what  about    the     gospel   falls as short  as  dusklight   and just as unnoticed    Noble   tokenism      we call it      and   this is your life    it replies    all casual      another clot of abstractions   sprung into matter by a desire so strong   it can't even feel itself think    the   longest   battle   is all that      spark   plug  attacking   the   water    it was unnatural  to worry or the world went up in flares  of memory   it was  unnatural  to call knowing   remembering   and we are caught   there     maybe     at the advent of blame   where we act out our own ghosts   and dangle them  out    towardtheheart    like   t r o p h i e s          that said    no use in pulling back either

Sharper Now

In the power of the image of power      I purse my lips  and the lights fade        to   a   source of patience          the mint brigade      brigade     brimming   with     the rage of a source   and penitence and remorse    both   foolish    both    lazy   and lavish    both ways   now   chase one another in the power   of the image    of   power    I trace my lips with my middle    finger and the symbol whispers screams  

lentement     the French onyx way to   say slowly       really says    holding back   retrieving dignity through the discipline of the so antisocial refusal of it       an erotics of denial   and     sin         and denial of   sin.     I love to sin.   Like the time   I pretended  the music   was a vat of my daddy's blood and    swam   in   until I   remembered    the pot was on          water smoldering  to   mean rust       like the time    I  shrugged   off the fantasy  and it came back   real   like the time      I       planned the reason and it came   back   matted   in my belly    almost immaculate       I'm trying to figure out what I'm talking   about    too       the muted muscle of  logic   flexes   a legible blues    like the time I felt my own   conception   happening       as    it was happening            watching my parents   from the     crack    in the    atmosphere        how   I came here to save   them     through the kind of understanding   the shield   leverages when the    sun in    silent            

Proviso against cybernetic disguises

Jezebel Said (1)

It's common to feel illumination from within, as if thousands of little lights were burning inside your body. Just accept your sleeplessness and enjoy it. Call genius a mask for stupification, flat fiction of a race lost in the stupor of transcendence. And black genius and incremental forms of settler colonialism go hand in hand, love the colonist for forcing you forward in a blue dream like Kierkegaard did and Charlie whistling a field order you ignore in spirit I remember it I remember ignoring it in spirit respect duality but don't land in it and dance like a fire deity too proud to come to her knees your karma has risked burdensome doses of pleasure to moan this yesterday through a body to recite what Jezebel said to the saints and release the meaning as silence

Mythogenesis (2)

And that's why you have to watch the jackal

Dear Dad,

I found the big purple grapes with the seeds in them, just like the ones we used to share out on the porch before you lost your voice and I lost my appetite. Organic too. Two lifetimes ago. The first bite brought tears to my eyes. Could be the way the tambourines and tender harp strings in the chants I've been listening to on Alice Coltrane's Transcendence, through huge encompassing headphones, could be the way those insistent tones mingle with the silent almost mimed grasp of my tentative bite and time my ambivalent cells for reaction, rational pleasure. I know none such. What about the communities and minds in which the idea of longing is being reproduced all the time? What about that memory erases the chalk off your silhouette again.

The other day I hung out with an Italian friend, writer, one of Amiri Baraka's old friends. We talked about the subtle revolution of releasing his collected poems in time for Black History Month. I was a little crestfallen by that cold capital precision, and then yes, we got to the topic of children, Amiri's 9 children. The way this man put it, one was by "a re-educated hooker." I looked on unphased. A "re-educated hooker" who had been living in the basement of the home he shared with his wife and children when they conceived this child, whom he took in and raised as his own, for this was his own. I once heard him say abortion is genocide for members of the African diaspora in the US, that no matter what. There's something about it I find heroic. There's no scandal to boast of there. It's beyond scandal. There's no landless population or listless copulation or say what you want Imma raise all my children to the royal hemisphere and back again from now until after the last sky I am, I could hear Amiri thinking, what is wrong with groovin? What is wrong with groovin?

And back in the globe of these grapes, I've lost my appetite for tension. I've stopped pretending I can't see the past like future and I see them side by side approaching their favorite porch to tell a wide mobility into the stillness. It may have been the ruthlessness that brought us to our respective voices, it may be, it will be, it is, we demand it thus, to a new sense of what the present time might be, to the empathy that some dispersions might be, to the silent fable of a seed.

 The steepest love,

 Harmony

Three temptations

They're not the same temptations, but they are three temptations

Rose Ormus

Of the fair illusion 

Of the ruthless accuracy 

Of the way everything wants to be new and everlasting 

I trust that 

I trust that 

I trust that 

I trust that you have followed us, held us captive as an act of revenge and now looking over your own shoulder, paranoid, are menaced by an undying love    Yeah   that's diasporic consciousness 

A way of overcoming        severance 

Now you know my gypsy heart

Aloof in unified time

Dear Dad, 

What if the ecstatic backlash is now. What if I told you of the supreme inadequacies of the Hollywood lean  on me    when you're not strong   as now .  But    When are you not strong  and this afternoon of georgia fawn   and all the lumber distorted by words when it could be shelter what if the  mercy is now  as I ween myself off of mercy it gets so large and encompasses everything worth admitting.  Why can't more men be their own fantasies, and sing so manic lead lanterns flutter in the allegory of the cave   shuts backwards.   What if I told you a rapper with a few kids and few baby moms got me pregnant on a promise    once upon    the propaganda of promises and what he calls himself on dry land   what if I admit it to the black myth at last     and I aborted that kid as fast as I could but she's still  with me   like a phantom  sophistication I can't quite imagine ever being without again.  The kind of power every  poet is hungry for     and resists.  If that's as close to being a mother as I ever come, if the divine feminine all the anarchists strum about has landed in this pantomiming cliche to wonder at  my radiance or my bravery my masochism or my makeshift spasm of responsibility,  to learn on my taste for the daze and how I ain't misbehavin but it ain't nobody's bidness when I do. This story belongs to everybody.  This tiny evidence of every trapdoor :  opening .   This casual  baby.   What does it teach us but how to protect our confidence   in   parallel universes    and invisible planets on this planet.   That tragedy is not the highest form of art,  and how we're all fools when we believe that anything is tragic, and that girl, that black Antigone who outlasts us all  in the dream   every morning I'm giving birth    and the child disappears  and the displaced love   rivals   the value of terror   to   discipline us into our  best denial.  And  what if I find this kind of thing romanic   a way to feel the sham without hiding beneath it. Looking for a new question the way you taught us to that night you ran into the fire and came out clean having memorized the blank dimension. All my antics are in admiration of that fire and water plans itself in the break. 

Yours with love, 

Harmony 

A little bit of Clay

How dysfunction leads to fetish and the gospel gets rich. Ah, libretto is such a beautiful word to motion with here, and to,  and  the joke blows through it like a buttered temple. Whatever. It's my libido afterall, my sex drive, that makes me so creative. says Clay. It's my libido, my sex drive, that makes me so destructive, too, he adds. All silently of course. Who would admit this aloud on stage. Maybe a dancer. Maybe the girl I'm not brave enough to admit I love. I love her so much I create and destroy her just to create her again. Jazz made this neurosis cool. Cool made it cook. Cooking turned it black. Carbon to be exact. But to copy no one, that's the only fact designed to survive the fractal that made it act like a culture, cult, ultimatum. We blame our attitudes on the jacked up cubism of the role playing. Let's all just admit to being children and then never buckle under the duties of the persona again.  Clay is so beautiful, he roams in us all, he calls the mirror, mama, mama, mama, the mere idea of this man in a suit always reproducing his mother is at the root, the glad godded root, of our every perverted and beautiful municipality. Here he wants to say something universal like, what if I bruise my trophy on the way to the ghost, what if all this spirit becomes visible and I quit my job, run out on my demons , and look too far into things like I was in Angola or Senegal again, clairvoyant again, what if I'm the dandy I mention scatologically and act like I don't understand and what if my hypocrisy is all just panic, when all I want is to dance naked so far away from the plan that I become the only plan and own some land and harvest that land and what then. The quicksand in a frenzy of deliberate longing became heroic for Adam and Eve in the city. We get drunk on bleeding apples and long for some other spring and even our hope is lazy and domesticated. Will Clay survive his self-awareness as our empire eases into a casual fascism. Anyhow, I wish I knew who the boss was I would tell him who the boss was wishing I was when he was was wishing I was him. Clay puts it simply, how to stay black in a white idea. 

Adam and Eve and the City

An ancient mechanism

Men, Etc.

A thrilling escape to freedom

Smoking Dope

Even the lantern I hold up to the jutted flame is vicarious,
I mean if I don't do this shit why do I understand it so well   casually like a game     find the damned so glamorous
and all the fiends heroic     at least the talented ones             like mammies and jazz, mundane obscenities    that spasm of our common myth, that's all the laughter   and  shatter  I can lift in     and live         How talent invents trouble because we get bored with the thwarted neurotic trill  of elsewhere      and conform to that boredom  as cowards   and  loud capital      and that's      what trouble is,    a certain  sound in the feeling     having conformed to boredom to stump the soul   a sudden mutation cattle run  not like revolution,  not courageous enough to bluff in circles       but like   space travel ,  quantum     how our values      make the   money   sad    and profuse   as a user    settling  his millions    into the trunk of my father's better corvette   and    letting   me watch   my father get in,  hostage to his opinion of what's    happening       again           and drive into the ocean   of my   style     this is   my style afterall,   my form — the seedy   and shy way we   take to  the edge   all lazily   and intentional       show  out      grow   a habit  to shout about    the way I'm addicted to men     at last    to the power of speaking    that longing that always grabs for a new name    can celebrate   the   playful retina   between experience   and   dream   the way  I    mean to celebrate     the fancy wreckage   of   all our  flashbacks     to              have  mercy on my     shadow     dear lord       I     believe     you    have broken titles   and ties    with  the cold safety of omniscience       to     patrol the unknown for royal niggas      mutter our names on royalty checks   like a series of insults   until   we get     it       whole,         and         teach   us to shrug like angels        That's one theory  

Medicine for Soft Times

Turns out all my heroes beat their wives. How redundant. And my anti-heroes shove them into the footwork like diabetic soldiers. My circulation craves the wine of I told you so but I'm uncoerced and free to shudder the levels of mistress all over the court   ship     ships have always been difficult for us   and the water they lean on and what's all the fuss about the love of boys   who could have been men      there is no weakness associated with this    just excellent nostalgia   that almost French kind of lime glimmer in a grey corridor of shiny niggas    ah  that word binds itself to hope  in my every nursery   does that sign really say    service meat     is there a new dimension of food   we can't yet  see  but  as blood and beauty 

Daft   patches of dimes in the iris   shyest dancer    actually the boldest when the lights blur whys   and wise       First Amiri Baraka died.   Then my grandfather. Then Bobby Womack. Then Horace Silver.    Then the land.    Then the fantasy of the land.  Then the lamb in the hybrid   jesus idea.    Then the idea itself. Wide   is that belt they would whip out   wide as we could ever spread our perfect legs    rough as the empty tire swing in my   inkling of   home   with my other king and my other king      I think suffering is finally the only joke      the thing my incident woke   up / too    another black comedian with a gun and a loose child     this one adopted      this   one napoleon   this one   with a time fetish   this one    with a couple of drums locked in the basement   this one  who loves   to wait   for the night  to strike its most intimate dice pose   and clap alone til it grows into morning  

I'm not saying these are soft times but Imma find me        some medicine  I'm not saying I lost mine    but Imma find my    men again,  even the liars    keeled over the fetal bodies of their forgotten widows lobbying for silence     can be recovered     like an herb    I'm finally going into to the forest with someone who's been the forest    and I'm finally the one who's going into the forest and the one who's been  

Élan Vital (Mesmerizing Niggas)

Cause it's like a big dream. Cause she's on the dream plane. They've found a way to turn even the the safe zones at the end of Alice Coltrane's Prema into commercials and advertisements for Home Depot and shit no one ever cared about but everyone did in bouts of situational play me for the herd, mercy hurts like pretense, relief would be too intense sometimes, our nerves shattered and reinvented as moods we apply to all this terribly imperative information. For example Martin Luther King's closest friend said Martin  used to use the church collections money to hire white prostitutes and beat them silly at sex parties like the cops did his women in those peaceful protests. If there's no such thing as justice then why don't they make commercials about this so I don't have to read about it casually in between buying heirloom seeds and sandals, look out the window and a lonely g pictures his life as the yuppie couple across the street walking their german shepherd at 6AM and denial is the only organizing principal we all soldiers for the war on our own naturalness not that it should have come naturally to King to think in every direction at once but because that's what niggas do     that's what heroes do      that's the dewy rosehued flesh of a true day in the morning