I want a land where the sun kills questions

I sometimes wonder if openness is becoming a crutch. The transparency so many turn to for salvation keeps proving to be a shallow attempt at distilling one's own grief and misunderstanding into the hearts of others, in my experience. Honesty deployed as relief like the criminal surrounded by his crimes and somehow pleased for having confessed them to the victim in a confusion of the difference between committal and commitment, and at the same time there are no victims, or others, anyways, the other person is always you, and that is no longer surreal just basic knowledge. And what is a confession? A yielding energy born of infinite pressures to measure the self in relation to its actions/deviance/retreat/from a center built on nerve or lack thereof. Self-objectification. Tacky and beautiful. The verb self and the verbal self make a pact with experience. What is so confessional about our culture now that isn't also somehow sinister? Like what we call reality is just this mounting evidence of the mask. A monument to the mask that makes us feel so real and exactly visible and invisible at the same moment. Like the sun is when it illuminates everything and makes mysteriousness into the farce and inevitability that it is. It makes it hard and eager to concentrate. But at least its disappearances are consistent and regal. At least the sun's cowardice and its courage are born of an identical impulse— a brilliant maniac it must feel like out there on stage every day trying to save us from the hunt for meaning. The futility becomes not that it isn't there (the meaning) but that it's all there, it's all illuminated, until a primitive indifference to everything but its truest function must make that radiance feel a bit blasé, but no less lucid, just almost fed up with its own truth.  So all writers should run. Everybody should, to understand the pretense of getting away from oneself in order to learn oneself, to understand how the value of a good mistake is in our ability to let it answer only to itself without becoming just another crime or dream, to refuse the doubt that guilt encourages. And because this is the land between yes and no...

Running does to the body what right language does to the spirit. You reveal one truth and another, deeper and more difficult one is immediately born in the space you thought you had carved out for alleviation and recording. There is no history, only an infinite present. Each stride, each word, I thought I'd cured the abyss/ I'd only exceeded it and turned into this avid speaker between me and my own listening, a point of access to the subconscious that then needs to be toned in order to avoid excess seeing (over-vulnerability) or blindness (delusion). Most everything becomes symbolic and mundane in that newborn haven of an abyss, and most of all... anything that could last through all that silence, deserves the name love, when you finally find it, again, for the first time. Each and every discovery is a romance. I once underestimated the capacity of my own, heart, soul, and spirit, now I spend the abyss forgiving myself, not quite Dionysus but not quite anything else either. It seems perfectly natural to assume that I have always existed. The phone rings. I'm accidentally calling myself from my computer. I still have the strength to laugh. You still don't have the strength to cry and when you discover it don't take it for granted. Yes, that's love.

Did I hear you say you didn't believe in marriage?

I seen it happen from EtatdeSiege on Vimeo.

Open Letter (2)

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 

Concatenations (privilege)

We know the story will end happily. The characters in the story do not seem to know this

The Good Manners of Vampires

Like not demanding something of a tradition that is not in it    We were only trying to resist denial

I'm finding more and more that no body knows anything about the bible   so it doesn't matter who's cain and whose the lie or getlow  and how  everything beautiful is suddenly an excuse for its own ugliness—I wanted to ask why as if we were on television and I could detect the pain of my intelligence well up in his eyes like gloves and a mask before a drastic approval— watch the eyes like a mammy in blackface/afraid to cry in a laughing place   but not prayed up enough to do anything other than   misbehave like people   Matrophobic old ass niggas, at least 40, married to their mothers, court me one by one until I wonder forever young, I wonder when the joker's gonna pop out of some Hyundai with a set of golf clubs and gold teeth and try to teach me again about the tradition.  Everything is funny and uniform like the militant black me coming back in uniform and finding my one true love lynched has himself on some illuminative mimicry but he's still in the bloody tree scrawled and alone like a poem on the wall of its intention just about to bend for realism when it gets all witchdoctoristic and sunny stitt on the swingset and you hear someone in the audience whispering over big earnest claps, I thought we had killed all those people. If the music gets too polite, if you recognize it at all, I'd run too, the whole way through