485 Words on American Politics, and Politics In General

“Bloodsport. Self righteous crusades. Here’s why I’m right and you’re wrong. You’re a decent person , but you’re just not good enough. My people know best and yours are misled. Our money? I know how to use it better. What’s wrong with this country? I can fix it. I promise you everything – my entire career; my soul…”
And we’ve been watching since the scops sang – we’ve been reading about it since the hooded figures first retreated into their private studies. What’s changed? A sport enabled by spectatorship, an arena of suits, ties, dresses, and pearl necklaces… A participatory culture that always promises change in some fashion: politics in all of its grandiosity.
Favoritism, the cascading and residual effects of nepotism at the highest levels. We the people select our champions and wait for them to do our work for us while we kick back and eat on our couches after a long hard day of sharing words and pushing buttons in exchange for a handful of money. We politicize – we talk about our favorite few with our peers. We compare opinions and justify them under the light of morality, or in some cases, a lack thereof. In short, we do the best we can with the opportunities that have been given to us by those in charge…
But what if that’s all wrong? What if the only thing “in charge” is human nature? What if the only thing that actually changes, or will ever change, is simply the way we talk about who we want to talk about? What if all there really is, is the conversation? Let’s pause for a moment and consider the alternatives to the institutions that be… Thought about it? Good. Isn’t it obvious that there really isn’t an alternative? Now why might that be? Because there isn’t an alternative to human nature. Greed, lust, protectivism are all we know.
It’s no surprise, then, that the state of American politics or really any politics at all, are in the condition that they’re in. People do their best to survive and prosper. Unfortunately, such a process usually involves the putting down of the other, or the rebuking of the self, for the sake of material gain. It is seemingly unavoidable. Yet imagine a scenario in which the self need not be rebuked, in which the other need not be put down. Imagine a scenario in which the community rallies together to decide upon a common good. It is this imagined reality that constitutes the heart, soul, and drive of the political process, though will it ever truly be reached? Perhaps, though I imagine in order to do so we’d first have to decide what it means to be human… Will we be a species that exists to better ourselves through the bettering of the other, or will we be a species that exists to further our means at the expense of our neighbors?

The Compress

Passing

You in the intimate

hallways of airport terminals

You look at me with venom

in your eyes sinking the fangs

of your consciousness into me

as if I were a rodent to be consumed…

I am

a.

proud.

black.

youth.

striding past you

as I wear the color of your skin

Is it really that hard to believe?

enserio hombre I can

feel your eyes boring

into the pores of my

technicolor epidermis,

I suck my teeth

at your ignorance;

but its useless

because they’re already bored bitless

de-tusked like your judgement

is a plague of entitlement

sweeping across the plains

in crooked and tattered wagons

and we were all guilty of it

at one time or another –

our ancestors the clouds frown down

from their perch in the Heavens

the colonies of cumulus poofs

the closest we’ll get to seeing Big G

god

whiter than me

whiter than Dean

deemed dead

whiter than the eyes

of the Congregation.

Yet Black when it rains

Black when they speak the loudest

Black like here I am hanging while

The period cracks

The page thunders

you struggle to parse yourself

together, losing yourself

in the other; your

neighbor seated next to you

scratching their head

while you scribe furiously

at times without your voice

at times with your paper

though always the truth…

a truth,

you’re trying but it’s evasive

so you confess the au jus

of your bones; creole marrow

sucked from its Hollows

(trust me I’d know)

I sat in a crock pot

for 18 years while

my Mexican father

sampled my essence

pretending to be white…

try to stop me, please

I beg you, seriously

because I don’t think

I could even stop myself

as my heart beats itself to

a pulp pressing words into meaning-

Constructions. Inverse:

my words are a pill press

here have some of my serotonin,

here have some of my dopamine,

I won’t give a fuck!

So take what you will;

If it makes you uncomfortable

I’m sorry.

Written to You, Achronotic Locus

Where does one begin when they’ve yet to decide what constitutes a “beginning?” Is there a way to break free from the shackles of the inner critic? How does a writer decide what they write about? Is it possible to become great by writing from cold-starts?

My father Bryan once told me that nothing is worse than someone who does the same old shit yet expects different results. “Asinine; It’s asinine,” he’d say. My father John once told me that all great writers became great not by meticulously picking at their works, but rather by churning out content. Loads upon loads of content. “Writer’s write,” he’d say.

Yet my mother always had the answer that I needed to hear, and most times, wanted to hear as well. “You can do whatever you set your mind to.” She still has all the right answers. I think she’ll have them until she transcends the limits of her material form…Then she’ll simply become the answer. As we all will. Hopefully.

Yet here I am again, waging a lounge-ful war against the wasteland of the blank page with one hand behind my head; the other scratches a nib at a legal pad as would a toddler his scabbed patella. Fun, obsessive, low-key self-disparaging…But really just asinine.

“It’s just freehand” I’d tell myself. “Nothing’s wrong with a little free style, right?” And then, I realize, (as do most writers at some point or another) “Well no. I’m not writing for myself, per se, but rather writing for the exaltation of the all mighty, all encompassing “you.” That indomitable thing that is both self-contained and infinite. Similar to “it” or perhaps “they,” but really in a league of it’s own.

Writing to “you” is like writing backwards on a window; it is both an installation and a shattering – or better yet, dissolving – of the fourth wall. Well, the “second” window I suppose: the inverse of writing, the reading. “You” has this sort of sacred energy bound to it. When we read the second person, we might think of ourselves, but of course we really think about all the various people that the particular, nuanced “you” could be referencing.

“You” is tricky. “You” is double sided; it is at once the writer and the reader; the verse and its inverse. Imagine. When we write in the second person, we’re inevitably using our knowledge (our past experiences) to develop a sort of common ground between all walks of life. A universal, if you will. It is one such application that is as equally reflective of the self (of the individual; of the writer) as it is of the “other,” which is of course, also an aspect of the self.

Delving into the self; to write is to journey and to vanquish the unconquered, but it is more a struggle against that which makes us tick. There is a constancy of untapped data and linguistic expression that undermines us all, yet it only breaks free when we begin to drag the nib across the wasteland of the blank page.

For example, I sat down and flipped open this page to celebrate my own individuality – my ethnic uniqueness, my rare and precious gift of time and concentration; that which affords me my writership. Yet, the first thoughts that leave my fingertips are colonial anachronisms much too foreign to originate of my own volition. So I must ask, does linguistic form precede thought? And if so, how does one escape this linguistic programming?

It would seem that the only way to truly redefine the base of level of cultural operation provided by the “mother tongue” (this theoretically goes for any language) is to become deeply aware of the linguistic history that shaped the way the language is performed.

Only then can one recognize when the language speaks for itself and when one truly speaks the language. It is a distinction created by the fecundity of being, by the ornate subjectivity called forth by the fusion of mind and body; one such fusion that exists in the alignment of the groin, the gut, the heart, and the corpus callosum.

It is the innate crossroad of humanity; that intersection of the internal longitudinal fissure and the external geophysical locus; the constant juxtaposition of the ground beneath our feet and the soul.

So to distinguish between speaking the language and being spoken through is to understand one’s own gravity; the uniqueness of the body even as it is in-creased by the mind; the uniqueness of the culmination of the in-creasing and overlapping of mind and body even as it is bound to the carbon skeleton of the genus of homo sapiens sapiens, and again doubly bound to the very bones of the Earth.

And what next? The intersection of the Earth and the Cosmos? The threefold bind of consciousness; it’s localization to the mind, then to the body, then to the Earth, and then from the Earth outward until our languages burst through the dome of consciousness until we expand into the stratified ether of the heavens or are compressed into the nether pits of hell; that which can be felt but never perceived.

Or rather perhaps such a threefold bind is better expressed through the most basic faculties of human thought: past, present, and future; redefined, memory, thought, and imagination. Only then can we see that linguistic expression is timelessness, as linguistic expression is the only means of parsing together the self across all regions of space and time.

The brain then becomes the Universe, and the dimmest stars hanging in the night sky become allegory for our deepest dreams, those that pervade the gaze of our most potent poets; that inexpressible starlight, that which sidesteps the eyes, ears, and lips of even Heimdall. What are we left to do but to accept and celebrate the oneness of being human? To smile, to respect, to be at peace with those around us even though their blood may roil with their own insecurities, their own doubts, their own linguistic barriers.

We must become timeless.

Airplane Shit-Talk Ain’t Really Shit Talk

Fragmentary engagement,

the pen bleeds as if

the tongue were sliced open –

Black ink droplets spattered

upon a page of decolonial

au jus,

 

a patois created as the flight

slips from the tarmac:

the grip of the

tires is required…

but words don’t play by

the same rules.

 

“I wish this pen

had that ink; I wish

people realized the

same truths I hold”

 

yet Subjectivity

makes its home in us all;

The body is a thatched roof blown open

by the gusts of our hearts

& our caucus is a flock

of sparrows –

 

we are a murmuration

contrasted against a black

& blue horizon;

 

Our society is a bruise,

We are a bruise.

We cloak ourselves in black as we

embrace the sideways angle

of our page.

 

Our peers sit beside us;

We are one, voices sync’d

asses glued to the same row…

Vessels inside vessels, cells inside cells,

We are

the same caramel drizzle of consciousness

 

yet with each moment passed

there is an unspoken and audible

shuffling of the deck; the differance of dispositions

 

yet what irony!

Writing such statements

through a pen without ink.

Ripped Open

What in the fuck is going on man

Seriously I’m quite confounded

Up and down and up and down, back n forth and again

 

and again and again and again

I swing my mind to and fro

 

as I stumble into myself,

words hang from me like

 

trinkets I adorned myself

like cracks on a broken

 

pane of glass, once fully transparent

now abject – a spider’s web; a hideous grace

 

momentary astigmatism,

ouch.

 

followed by silence cut short

like the hair on my head

 

and every drop of magic

has evaporated from the philter,

 

once full of whimsy now flimsily

folds in half; doubled over like a corpse

 

its mouth drooping into a frown

while the melt of sadness

 

forces it to hang its head, its neck

bends, it becomes itself without definition.

 

Once individuated like grains of sand,

Now a formless amalgam of everything it once was,

 

Its body is a ball in the palm of your hand,

Compact, and full of creases, until you throw it

 

And it shatters as it hits the floor. Crystalline shards

slide into every corner of oblivion

 

and so you ask yourself

“Who would dare pick up that mess?”

 

But no one else occupies the space,

So you rebuckle your belt, lace up

 

your shoes, and sweep everything

into the embrace of your notebook.

 

Reading this aloud you notice the venomous tip

Of your tongue as the speech impediments stir

 

Your boiling pot of self-doubt, suffering, shortcomings

And general frustrations with yourself.

 

There is no happiness there is no sadness

There is only the beat of the poem, its wings unceasing

 

Until it rests in the graveyard of you,

until it’s words become ashes in the wind…

 

So I keep the page open

And write until my wounds stop bleeding

 

Page be my tourniquet, because I’m not feeling these

Bandages. Joleen says I should take SRIs

 

But I’d rather press into the void of my mind

Reaching in with my entire self,

 

As if the topic of me were an aqua-ring –

A circle moving forward at the expense of its own

 

Mass; reiterating itself like a flower, blossoming like

Flowers on a tree, and its suddenly not so far-fetched

 

to tell the people sitting next to you who you are

and where you’ve come from.

 

And so then it becomes so incredibly clear that “you”

Is that indominable thing that is both self-contained

 

and infinite. Similar to “it” or perhaps “they”

but really in a league of its own.

 

Writing to “you” is like writing backwards on a window;

It is both an installation and a shattering of form.

 

“you” is tricky. “you” is double sided;

The versed, spelled out, and the inverted,

 

Subversive only for the sake of appealing to all.

What Strange Times We Live In

 

where “fuck you”

is synonymous with

“fuck me,”

 

when “you” is a

reflection of the self

and “me” is lost,

rarely seen or mentioned –

being too informal

or perhaps not fashionable

enough.

 

So “me” is used when necessary

and never indulgently,

(we do enough of that as it

is) – indulgence, I mean –

oh yes. Oh, yes…

 

yet “ego” fra(mes)(&)(its)elf,

hiding between prefix and suffix,

rooting a canopy of an idea in your mind.

 

It’s not really applicable,

or compatible

or even, odd, et al –

and you realize that “me”

is kind of like the number

zero. Just a concept,

 

nothing more,

nothing less;

 

somesense.

 

 

I Lurk Late, Futon Dreams

And so the raven

peers perched atop my head

into my perception, bores

with its beak a bolt–

hole through my eyes

 

and the hands descend

fanning out behind my

skull, each enladen

with an eye in the

palm

 

and it all fell into

place when I

traversed the hallway

of consciousness,

looking down that corridor

of books, realizing

just how much I’d gotten

myself into.

 

So now I

recount this dream

on the backs of poems

while my three black cats

sit idly by– one of

them now jumping

for the paper hanging

from the nail

in my wall.

When the Pretentious are Confused

the people sit in circles

eating small meals

while recounting

what came before

 

when they open their mouths they

speak as if they’ve got “it” all figured out

and direct their limbs so elegantly

one might mistake them for some prominent conductor

or maybe even an old Greek statue

— how they hold their arms outstretched

— their fingertips extensions of their minds

 

but then the moment passes

and they’re no longer paused

because they don’t know anymore than

anyone else does, lost just the same,

mesmerized by freedom’s haunt

Pas Encore…

Nous Voici.
Nous y revoila,

se balancant a travers les saisons
mon ami.

Donc Nous Voici,
Nous y revoila,

Comptant Nos benedictions
seul dans le silence que se couche dessous nos sentiments…

alors seul, maintenant seul, seul alors
même pendant que nous rêvons de l’autre…

Nous allons donc pas l’accent sur le reste.
Juste nous permettre a fleur ces
merveilleux choses grandissant entre toi et moi:

Un Amour Mûri,
Une Passion intacte et pure,
Un Amour épanoui…

Un Amour issu de respect mutuel,
Un Amour non reconnu…

Pas tout de suite…

Pas tout de suite.

writer’s laminate

“If writing’s what you love to do, then do it and don’t ever stop doing it. Because the only thing we’ll ever have is what we love.” – Cole K.

Yet I find myself

lost, wondering about my

own merit. Gauging my

success with a flawed metric.

 

Success should be derived from

accomplishments, feats of independence

not from the opinions of others.

Even still, our humanity requires

comparisons to be made–

from one soul to the next

we encompass each other

as if eclipses of some divine

Being.

 

the pen moves itself across the page

and the writers scrawl sentences

partly their own and partly something else’s

 

and we sit astonished as our government

carpet bombs, paying cadets to walk in circles,

while we shoulder the weight of debt–

most of us six figures in the hole

 

and stanzas are strewn about intermittently

vastly unrelated to one another–

for the most part anyways

 

But our kitchen is the heart

of this culmination of cultures,

beating beneath the rhythms of our music,

noticeable only in the still hours–

a white noise seldom appreciated.

note .

How I’m moved

By the wonder of

The written word

Of information

And the way she

Dances around me

Books tweets

Scrawls in notebooks

In images and in

Memories shes like

A Moroccan dancer

On an evening

In Marrakesh

Shadows slip

From wall

To soft dirt

that layered

The under foot

Candle light

Flickers from

Each table

And she is

Cast in a new

Light as her

Body spins

And unfurls

Spins and

Unfurls and

Again and again

Gold baubles hanging

From her silk

Garments flowing

With the energy

Of her movements

Orange light bounces

Back at onlookers

As she pivots

Between left

And right

Gyrating her

Hips swinging

Them freeingly

As does a child

Swing themself

For the first time

On a playground

In New York

Her juul

Stone slab upon stone slab, cool

to the touch. Draft greets them, their window

hanging open a tad. “Grab a coat.” Her juul

 

blinking silently as he begins to unspool

a thick lump of Flandria Virginia. “Tin’s low.”

Stone slab upon stone slab, cool

 

droplets of rain collect on the stool

where they burn bifters during Heaven’s grey crescendo.

Stone slab upon stone slab, cool

 

flakes of snow now pool

over Vic’s car outside. The little mouth of its gecko

hangs open a tad. “Grab a coat.” Her juul

 

crackles again, and– “Obviously,”– I ain’t no fool 

but Vic’s offended and somewhere the mouth of Limbo

hangs open a tad. “Grab a coat!” Her juul

 

again blinking, his tin still low but his pouch is dual

so he rolls heavy anyways, tobacco

stone slab upon stone slab, cool

hangs open a tad. Grab a coat: Her juul.

 

//

Villanelles are really fun to write, but it’s definitely going to take me a handful of attempts to come up with anything substantial. Hardest part about this form is coming up with a strong A1 & A2. Without a clever refrain, the poem just doesn’t make sense. Practice is fun though, so I think I’m just going to work on ’em for a while

Teardrop,

A teardrop rolls

encumbered by Pain and Memory.

One-part sodium, one-part

water, three-part emotion,

 

A teardrop rolls.

Wide arching turn,

it bends around the corner of the mouth

Before dripping from the underhang of the chin.

A brief moment of hesitation

Then it falls

 

And a teardrop refracts

weight through its curves.

It is an inverse mirror, absorbing life into its wholesome body.

It is the grinding of stones and boulders,

Until it inaudibly bursts upon the floor.

The First Dream: Lune

Sunlight dripped over the spiny ridges of a mountain range – northern winds pushed cool air and mist down into the valley in which they had been camped. 

Rain drops began to fall, and the misty air blew ever so gently across their faces. 

            “Rough week so far.”

            “Only as rough as you allow it.”

Silence fell once more, and the two began to prepare for breakfast in the pre-dawn light. 

            “I’ll grab the firewood”

            “- and I’ll grab the flint.”

They were close friends and often completed each other’s sentences. But a distinct distance remained, as if they were two opposite poles on the same magnet. It wasn’t enough to place a strain on anything though. It was just natural.

The First started off into the brush. 

            I wonder how many we’ll down today… Yesterday we cleared six thousand… there’s no way we can top that…

The thicket beyond the clearing where they had made camp was dark and even more damp that the saddest of swamps. It reeked of mud, and moss, and, above all else, rot. 

Yet The First paid it no mind. She had the eyes like a fox and a nose more instinctive than the finest raptor. 

The First squelched deeper and deeper still. All light had succumbed to the shadows around her. 

And then she whispered. She whispered the name of wind. She whispered the name of fire. 

The vines at her feet coiled around her ankles, and the small hair sprouting from their felt chlorophyllic veins sank their fibers into her pores – yet she whispered.

“Still,” and the trees responded. 

Whispering, tumbling – tumultuous trembling; a palpitation, a quiver of arrows not yet harvested rubbing against themselves in the heart of the forest. The wind came to her aid. 

Arcane energy funneled from the vines at her feet and they released their binding grasp, withered and died. 

Their essence became her own and the energies of The Hearth crescendoed with that of her own; culminating into her hands, a pool of aura collected in the cupped and clasped hands which she held in front of her face.  

And then there was light. 

Opalescent

A glittering ruby, 

She walks down the stairs

One hand to the guide rail 

Eases the pressure as onlookers

Stare. 

Her name is Opal though a 

Ruby by art 

Pristine, adorned in silk 

Her gait pierces the 

Heart. 

Fiddle the thumbs, 

Twiddle dee dumb

Im off a bean

Im sippin ciroc

“Take all these shots”

I sway and I rock. 

A far reaching glance, 

You take my hand in yours

And we elevate 

In the heat of this moment

Fuck all of this shame 

Fuck all of this hate

I see you and you see me

Set aside these differences

I beg you my dear. 

hush (review)

Hush: Media and Sonic Self-ControlHush: Media and Sonic Self-Control by Mack Hagood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

hush is a delightful read offering a bounty of pristine syntax, thoroughly informed chapters, and carefully constructed arguments. It’s a masterful blend of cornerstone theories – a high-tech trophy case of superbly crafted arguments and rhetorical delicacies all centered around the mediation of sound. hush is broken into four sections: Introduction, Suppression, Masking, and Cancellation. Its introduction is a marvelous display of textual control in which the figures of Orpheus and Collin Kaepernick bear the proverbial torches of exemplification.

Inspired by Orpheus’ ability to enshroud his listeners in protective song and by Collin’s Beats by Dre audio campaign in which he rises above the cacophony of the crowd, Mack Hagood speaks his own sonic safe-space into existence – a safe-space that seeks to encompass all the rest. The introductory segment of hush dissects the ontology of sound and provides clerical insight into the history of its existence in the broader realm of critical and cultural theory. The subsequent sections discuss sound as object in various cultural realms, while also tracing the evolution of sound theory through a handy history of sonic media devices. Ranging from white noise machines, to mantra aids; from personal listening devices to the broader field of “new media,” hush argues that the real essence of media use is not the transmission of information but rather the attempted control of affect, the continually changing states of bodies that condition their abilities to act and be acted upon (Hagood).

“Part 1: Suppression” engages readers with a history of Tinnitus – the most direct negative affectation of sonic media usage, while “Part II: Masking” delivers a more positive and uplifting history of the more soothing repercussions produced by sonic media. It jumps quickly from subject to subject, stitch to stitch – Hagood’s needle-tip prose is both informative and fluid, and his anumerous pop. culture references make maneuvering the book’s passages much more rewarding. As if the topics weren’t enticing enough. Even so, the latter paragraphs are made doubly rewarding through a marked increase in the use of personal anecdote. Although hush takes a more contemporary and stylized approach to critical theory, it hits hard.

Every paragraph is rich with insight, and the text is expertly paced. It gets better as it progresses. In its fourth chapter “A Quiet Storm: Orphic Apps and Infocentrism,” sentences like “Over the past three chapters, we have used the filter of orphic media to hear history both dulling and sharpening the senses (Schmidt 2000, 3), generating new aural sensitivities and new means of suppressing and masking sound, as Americans’ affectively driven attractions and aversions took shape in new sociomaterialistic environments,” and “Today, an informative/noise binary has become one of the contemporary West’s central discourses, suffusing our notions and experience of acoustic noise with an informatic sensibility and instilling in us the imperative for sonic self-control” are strewn about as casually as refrigerator magnets.

Lastly, “Part III: Cancellation” exists solely to discuss noise-cancellation technologies and their contribution to sonic self-control ad campaigns (namely, those of Bose and Beats by Dre). This section gets a bit dicey as it utilizes racial differences to contextualize the differance between “white noise,” and “black noise;” the stark difference that exists between Bose and Beats by Dre marketing tactics; wanting to hear nothing in order to be left alone and wanting to hear nothing in order to be recognized for it.

Yet setting dicey metaphors aside, it’s a necessary read for any scholar interested in the ontologies and epistemologies of the human existence. For such a heady topic, Mack Hagood’s hush cuts sound theory down to incredibly simple and understandable terms yet manages to keep it as classy as Foucault. And the best part? It features footnotes and a list of references.

View all my reviews

//{spirit}

///{Your Name}///
:Never quit.:
:Never fade.:
:Persevere.:
:Overcome.:
//
:Their tears, our pain.:
:Their bones, our refrain.:
:From ashes, we emerge.:
:From phantoms, we become.:
//
{life; given}/{death; silenced}
{skull; broken}/{soul; violent}
//
(cleft hoof stampede)
(our call upon the Earth)
///{Your Name}///
//
:Let rain be their bane,:
:young hurricane untamed.:
//
(song of destruction)
(dance of revelry)
//
{net; cast out}
{harvest; plenty}
//
{writ; bloody, unrepealed}
//
…opening…opening…opening…
//
{machine pumps; full avail}
//
…/…/…/…
//
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