Friday, October 31, 2014

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

I only want you for sex (letter from the field)

The waltz on the edge of solipsism      another     golden  grill   in a  wall of blood   some  say    the thrashing stillness  of   motherhood   is an anti-lust     a   purification   ritual      don't trust   them     they    are the unwed   mothers  who    flock   to courtrooms    looking  for suspects   and order is reckless      Never confuse  me with a feminist  or manifest destiny      a few  steps   ahead   in the   oppression    I   am       visited   by   a vision    of   Horace Tapscott's  The Giant is Awakened  on the courtroom  turntable     and all mugshots   are public  domain so I  find a painless MLK in Memphis and frame him   in  gold  and I'm the lightshow (dj)   and all the   innocent ones   await    the fumbling  violin    and stare  blank   at   blonde ambition   pinups        and     a revisionist  history   of love       is     penned right there in the stairway between  myth and desire    where a woman   learns  to admit  hers   before   it devours  another   moment  in  the affair       it is better, some days,  to be terrible   in the service of  reverberating     mirrors        show them   how   it  feels       to have a goal   an agenda    that you're never  afraid  to speak   of      and   duck     when   they  realize   it's  a  decoy      we're not at war with our own  people      but Hollywood had   called

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Monday, October 27, 2014

You bear the illusions of others as if they were your own

now repeat that into this nest of microphones   everyone's a phony  

You bear the illusions of others as if they are your own

You bear the illusions of others as if they are your own

You bear the illusions of others as if they are your own


I get bored calling everyone cousin , for example , when there's no blood

I like what Yoko Ono says about madness,  that it's  performance, for example

a form you channel when bearing the illusions of others as if they are your  own  

a poem arriving like  sand  through the palm of glass hours   and   shattering   like   sermons  

a man I love distracted  from my naked body by a commercial for chicken wings

the last prince of non-violence

Saturday, October 25, 2014

The best seat in the house

Everybody's dead, so they can finally say what's really on their minds

Rhyme you outta  jail in time   to steal your rhymes    

How they love to use dialectics in a way to make you feel things that are not true

Like reticence stretches into abandon on the skin of confidence or confident desperation       the difference

                between life and death is finally  coming into question,  in the most optimistic  way  the plague is finally    Immortality



Break for war

Break for epidemic

Break for race  card         I am   a woman       woman is the nigger of the world     break   into her    for    her         what forest   of motives   this    sure     thing    

Remember the time   when we fell in  love   /     break for Michael     Jackson

Jesse Jackson  is full of shit,      break   for him       in the break    for     satisfaction        happy cantaloupe   /  island   break    for nourishment              

Never give  a sucker and even   break       ever     even    in the break   for courtship

break for judgement     caught  you   a   case    break   for    winning       glove     as vague  as breaking   with   tradition      what does that bullshit   even     mean    /   break   for translation         you   put  it down    and I pick   it up again         by   the time          the  tongue      the miner's    silent   confession   breaks    for          someone's  mother         breaks   to  blame    her         to  point   somewhere     like    forever       and   break   it into   images   savages    salvaged       made up of the thoughts   you   made   up  of the vibrations  that were made into  you        is  to   make   up   infinite future          and    break    for   life      slave /  wife     correlation   breaks   for   massa's    rape      at   sundown  1700 and something   forsaken      and   someday  far   later     in an earlier  way      this  great    mind     violator   meeting  violated  in the middle    with a tender   smile   of  misrecognition  (oneness)  tilted  like     prey   and prayer    away   from the mercy  to call it   forward    all,      Haven't you heard?  



Thursday, October 23, 2014

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Correspondence (5)

Summary: You know when you're watching a movie and you keep rewinding to the part before the hero is killed some billowing love scene or accidental  seance between  notions   of when  suspense is the most unreasonable    shield   all around   intermittent  acts of violence   / I really have to look at the world  from  inside their  heads      where shadows rotate and you can follow the time in shadows  /   shallow upsloped blindness of the blind  hero  saving everyone but himself  /  advanced    suicide  /  nobel  effort    ,    what is the afterlife       He can be evil   but you always like him           goodbye to sequences   but language  survives  them and we are born   teen   in the middle of a discourse  on motives   / and are not crushed   / and are not crushed      New habit  of reading  treaties where some abuse is reasonable     good stupid  people  getting married    fighting    wars /  all of us  

And I wanted to see what propaganda  does  to   the language   of us.  A fabulist's anatomy or stark distress, was it,  the pharaonic order of the jesters.   Does it become more elegant to snub  all  excess or does it begin to deflect   the  innocent extra in the background  there to make the scene    a home  within itself. Brightmoment. (echo) (echo with a difference) (Narcissus / trick or trick narcissus) More to say about morals  than   the morose way one line folds into pictures  of a whole community sorted by  the invention/fabrication of oneness. Otherness Blues. Ovanuss Ball. Negroes in vogue.  Prison Notebooks on the arm of a plush velvet sofa , phd students supple with theories that will  save the world  if only they were of the world. Can propaganda help us populate the other vision with no more scams  but  candid / some   dandy / some daddy     plath   ease  of reality   pretending to need a dream.  And   how will the icon fare  if he cannot  tapdance   when the amateur  assassin   saunters  in     to tell his story fast.    

Highlights: You know when you're watching a movie and you keep rewinding to the part before the hero is killed 
MLK was clutching a Newport  cigarette in one hand. His mistress was downstairs fixing her hair for dinner. Jesse Jackson and them were in the courtyard just beneath Martin's motel room balcony, allowing him to falcon for them, dressed like dandies  and value  systems   discussing  spirituals  and pigs   feet    all the doves   broke free   .   As the shot pierced his memory    he begged  one man to sing        him Stevie  Wonder   from  the future   sequence is over      please  tell your   story  fast    if you don't  it will come to   pass     In his breast pocket   a note about ritual   sacrifice   his witch  doctor's  advice  /  phone  number       someone kept it 

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Correspondence (4)

A/Symmetry: 

Let it be good to yourself

The exorcism  of Wu-tang  mountain    jam   jam jam jam    flow     elsewhere   woke up       in my   subtle   tokenism   with a casual  urge  to conquer  all sufferers    disguised as  ourselves

Masters  of running  clubs     nightclubs    private  temples      Booker Little  sound valves , apostles but

Nigga you still ain't mysterious      (I mean, abstract)     Massah  I mean    messiah   be mean to his own true style   just to get    a good trap   on the capital

So it was fun, to be in the future  

Inanimate dancer   some surly clouds  overhead like mammy robot arms /  O Oprah, what have you done

to the future,  what have you done to the suburbs     they're  underneath her  like   layer  cakes or tourists rubbing   a brass actor  buddha/ high speed dubbed to wu-tang   discussions  ,  what have you done    to the  rappers     distracted children    of  Japanese   immersion         gives    him the chills   when you     give  away   cars  

---

Ritual     In the keeping   of soul  in tact  there  are neurotic  repetitive   magics   that show up   as  disdain  for the outside   world      a hidden language   so busy it cannot communicate.  I think our double icons (devil/god/ cons)   are the purveyors  of that  speech     and their ritual   is to fall  victim  to  the  ambivalence  as proof   of the eternal  worthlessness   of  struggle.   Struggle   is just a mode of production    superior to carelessness   , inferior   to terror      maybe.    All is full of love this way, by a strange default we join under : transcendence.  The water of our tendencies.    And   the ritual  of checking  things   has its  own scene  in the  arkive.    To wake up craving images   above even oranges,   is   a large    hybrid    of  afterlife and unlearned righteousness.    It begins   feeling imperative  to   have   one  subject    to wake up  to (as)       and trust  it's  image in handcuffs   on the internet   /   to imagine Cornel West    has   a   personal    life   nothing  like the public   one   is crucial  to the survival  or ritual  
 in a land where the sun kills questions.  






Monday, October 13, 2014

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Correspondence (3)

Summary :   Love,  the most natural painkiller there is, love.  Monk quotes Burroughs to Nica , his extravagant confident,  and Nelly, his wife, in identical choked up letters toward the start of his so-called ending, trying to explain what premature retirement meant to him, that the public eye was a threat to the survival of love.  As suggested  earlier, the correspondence is vast.   The shadows take shape and we see the pianist taking notes on the shaping     

"Mind Rain 

Mind Rain 

Mind Rain 

Mind drain 

Mined drained

Mine. d   reign        ( too   easy      )    to easily   deranged   by  the mind     some hearts can be   ,

I believe  in  ( midlife  )    resurrection.  "      He   writes.       To the jazz industry in crisis


"I'm not as strange and mystical  as I seem   but  the  parody   pays  well       I like to sit around at home   and nurse   my dazes   until   they break    into   music while my son plays values on the drums Art Blakey gave him    


Don't wanna go out like those   beat  writers, getting  famous for things you're supposed to hide      futures we have yet to achieve   and untrue   love.  Wild motherfuckers  but temporary."     We find Theolonious was a lucid and most discerning   salesman     collapsing  aloof  into candor   and melody   into rumor,   using silence   the way a hype man uses  an  announcement        to  thrill   and bide.       


Highlights:   There are telegrams from Duke Ellington to Monk begging him to stop stealing his stuff. Jokingly, admiringly.    There's a collection of photos of hats from fashion magazines   with notes  for new compositions slashing through the photos, appearing as tempos appear. There are letters to his mother   thanking her for being so patient with him, recipes for lamb and chicken liver written  on club napkins, copyright forms for compositions that he never had the chance to transcribe, juice recipes Nelly suggested he try written in the margins of his dream diary  wherein he recounts  a recurring dream about being on stage mid concert and turning into a tiger in a cage made of tacky satin ribbons that he is meant to pave   with iron and will  until   he disappears    and wakes  up in the phrase   we sell the shadow to protect  the substance. 

We sell the shadow to support the substance

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Friday, October 10, 2014

Only saints have diabolical visions

Her father has alzheimer's         in  the absence   of desire  /  a  second   chance  / those damn carnations again  /  blush in the sorry order   of  ready-made  immortals    and          He finally forgot   her       and    all     the    others         and they cycle    the shore    for shells       for    chimes      for the  rejoicing    at    the   end of the      perfect  crime        where the  only   water    on earth  collects   in   your   footprints ,   the  sore   pears   of     all    belonging   bruised     blooded      wrong  unremembered   and   endlessly consumed  haunt   we will into    song/ He

                                                                                                                         finally   forgot   her    ,   they   both   celebrate   :    who are you     who   are   you      familiar     I     love     you        the    new    you      the       fickle    sonance      the     final  answer    some  prison  rioter   screams    at his   guard's  damned  shadow:      prove     it   ,      prove       your     love /  fiend / motherless child     and   disappear    into    denial   of               yeah ,   like     that             duty bound   motherfucker                  pioneer    motherfucker        in the backwards   direction     finally     forgotten        /     transformed    and    Los   Angeles              

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Correspondence (2)

Summary :  There's no such thing as a vindictive hero.  He shoved the naked black mannequins under the bed, but later parted with those too. Radical phantom, Henry Dumas. Local rapper gone international, underground. As stated in previous transmissions, the correspondence is wild, full of anti-social prophecies Dumas exchanged with Sun Ra, Malcolm X, Clarice Lispector, and Corretta Scott King, to name a few. There is the beginning of a script for a cinematic adaptation of Ark of Bones and list of black comedians he hoped would play the lead: Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor,  reads the list, and then a sketch of a cadillac in a cotton field surrounded by artificial carnations.  He was big on symbolism even in his private journals, hieroglyphics mingled with Sanskrit text, and images of his favorite entertainers were pasted between words and paragraphs like  an advanced system of punctuation by identity. He was always negotiating with himself in that way, letting the fray of persona unravel and recoil until a single character opened up and shared the other world with him.

I want a land where the sun kills questions.


Highlights : We find out Dumas fathered 3 children with whom he communicated only in writing. There are unsent letters to each of them detailing his plans to reunite the family and form what he called 'the glare of village' together. There's a copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks with extensive notes and pictures in the margins and sketches for a clothing line called "It's after the end of the war," comprised of 3-piece suits in Moroccan fabrics, are tucked into the back of the Prison Notebooks. There's a stack of love letters to Katherine Dunham, unsent, tenderly written. One begins, maybe the war is our second chance to dance our savage intuitions about ourselves toward some debonaire planet only we can invent and destroy together, for I, like you, grow weary of being an accomplice, no matter how great I am at this elsewhere amplitude.  And there are two plane tickets to Angola for April, 2017.

Monday, October 6, 2014

Green Crystals

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Local Rappers

And for those of us who are into staying up late, or are joining us from another  place in the world

       plus that thug   life   a girlfriend a   mistress   and a  wife              everybody's speechless on

Saturday   night    in   the  juke  a fight   breaks  loose  and   weave   might   fling   like   kites   and                
                      baptisms     but     it's     all    right                          it's   great for the industry     all that

hair   shipped from India       for sale   in what   look like    taco  trucks  bulging   mirroreyed with all the demand     right   outside the Audubon where  Malcolm   fell into   swan,   his  ballroom  closure --    it's  a   hospital  now    owned     by    the  longest   timing  University  can't heal people  but   pretend      just the other day  I was    looking   through   photos  of    local     rappers ,      mugshots,     whatever ,   and    a picture    of     Malcolm  X    at    the morgue     came  up    from out   of no where    ,    couldn't    stop   staring   ,    he  looked  so peaceful     and      removed       from    his   suffering   like      a   crease    in   the   song     of   will

Friday, October 3, 2014

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Correspondence (1)

Summary :  As stated in prior renditions, correspondence is rich, with sociological, spiritual, political and artistic aspects of Coltrane's life well documented. Along with activities within the Black Panther party, afore kept hidden by the family. There are also letters between Alice and Nina Simone, and between her and Angela Davis as well as interview requests from magazines ranging from Playboy to Ebony to Bomb to Downbeat, most unanswered as far as the record shows. There is a partially written autobiography the breaks down into sheet music for a theater production of film Ganja and Hess, re-imagined.  And there is an unfinished letter to Melvin Van Peebles requesting that he direct the production.

I want a land where the sun kills questions.

Highlights : There are several unreleased pieces of music including one full album entitled Run! There is a manifesto on transcendental meditation and an Oxford Annotated Bible with extensive notes in the margins. A stack of letters between her and her son Ravi, and a couple of letters from poet Amiri Baraka to her, exalting her music. And finally, there are tape recordings of interviews Alice conducted of fellow musicians who visited her ashram in California. Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Abbey Lincoln among them.