“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-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.
//:;:712e:;://
//{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}
//
…/…/…/…
//
[send][receive][save]
//:;:/3mJ
Reloj
Blackened spots
cloud visions,
the gaze far set
upon the horizon,
the dream lived
is the dream created,
bodies seeking refuge
we are a collective
forced to splinter
under the weight
of modernity &
As our globe spins
backwards
we are
twisted like
the concept
of time