Jason deCaires Taylor Underwater Sculpture

So This right here? This shit right here? Is in fact on my bucket list.

Lovin' is like

 Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (Black Hollywood Roylaty and Fab Couple)


My friend Butters asked me to write a blog about her. Mostly I should write about what a bad and ferocious bitch she is. I mean like the dessert Beyonce.  I mean she is just put TOO-Gether. She's smart, beautiful, successful, and she's down to earth and hilarious. She is strong and supportive and loves me unconditionally. If I had a gang she would in fact be my most trusted lieutenant. She's one of my biggest cheerleaders and I know that she needs me as much as I need her.  She's weirdly proud of her relationship with me. As if name dropping my moniker is going to get her pull somewhere.

Butters has made me realize that vulnerability isn't a weakness but a strength. Humility has a time and a place but my true nature is one of fabulousness. Honor lies somewhere between being selflessly devoted to the ones you love and being rigidly protective of your right to be utterly petty. She owns the full range of emotions that come with the human condition and isn't afraid to express each one of them. She laughs at herself, she laughs at me, she laughs at life and when I hear her laugh I'm pretty sure things are going to be ok.

She's taught me about hiding out in the open. About opening up in private. About dedication, sadness, loyalty, but most of all love. She set her sights on me and has been completely devoted ever since. Unconditionally. Sure. Steadfast. In her own unique and Arabic way. Her form is dogmatic and with brilliant poise she has proven to me that her word will last longer than the length space has at it's fingertips. 

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. 

There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. 

You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. 

What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won’t mean a thing. 

God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

— Toni Morrison, Paradise

The Start of Heaven

The oracle I consulted
Suggested I stop dreaming
Open my heart
And start to living
This holy woman at Delphi
Came to my mind's eye
Oddly enough
During a day vision
About shotgun shacks on
Elephant legs with
Corpses sun-burned to bone
Tagged with withered lynch ropes
Worn as frayed
Miserable chokers
Hanging in the window

The honorable lady
Who breast fed history
The last of her body
In a sacred duty
Spoke to me in Swahili
Words of beauty bathed in tragedy
She opened the black in me

 
And Middle passage Atlanteans came
To wake me in legions
They shoke me with their footsteps
Marching in roving stations
With stallions woven through their muscles
Seaweed dreadlocks
And skin shinny, moist
coated
a dark so black It mirrored the blue
Found at bottom of the ocean

They tore me
Up from a sleeping fancy
That had taken hold
And marked me stone
And there I would have remained
If the knowing one
Who sees
Had not shown to me
That sleeping through
Difficulty
Does not bring the bright
Cleanliness
That comes with being scrubbed by
Diversity
The steel wool of experience
Buffs our mortality
And unearths the sparkle
Hidden by banality
I need to greet all my pain
With eyes fully formed
And cleansed of all that follows 

 

Birth

I peak on docks that
Hold up oceans
And kiss the waves
That will share my affection
I ride rhythms from Ghana
That arrived by butterfly
and move me to non action
it is in being that I have succeeded

and it is continuing my heart beating

that my potential will be revealed

Metis and her Shared Memories

 How I became a nursemaid to misery
Parallels the story
Of my race to find glory
by tearing apart
the first heart I cross
With a fervent dedication
And a Compulsive devotion
I spent my disorder on
Beating and bending
The leanings of uncertainty
while trivially writing the glare of
a writhing frustration
I would speak in
Smiles and sunshine
And weave tales
Of hearts and honey
Of places filled with light people
Who smell of money
if it didn't make my throat feel so funny

I have seen a vision
While wasted in my own discharge
of a planet of chastity
With a barge of solar flares
That lay exchanges across the heavens
And waste the corneas of lesser angels
Leaving ashes of belief
As testimony spilling
Out of smoldering eye sockets.

So bloody and vibrant is my
White whale.
So Reasoned and worn
My albatross
Open from torn
Worn out and prostrate
Is the whore who would
Bear my daughter.

Complicated, generous,
Self destructive and honest
that is the face I’ve picked
It is the lighthouse I have hit
It is the coast I emerge upon
Choked up and free.
Study this walking journal
Written across the backside of my footsteps
And watch for my kind of destruction
the lesson I give
lies in tears and inability
in disappointment and vanity
stubborn survival
and the ultimate truth. . . .

How I became a nursemaid to misery
Parallels the story
Of my race to find glory
by tearing apart
the first heart I cross
With a fervent dedication
And a Compulsive devotion
I spent my disorder on
Beating and bending
The leanings of uncertainty
while trivially writing the glare of
a writhing frustration
I would speak in
Smiles and sunshine
And weave tales
Of hearts and honey
Of places filled with light people
Who smell of money
if it didn't make my throat feel so funny

I have seen a vision
While wasted in my own discharge
of a planet of chastity
With a barge of solar flares
That lay exchanges across the heavens
And waste the corneas of lesser angels
Leaving ashes of belief
As testimony spilling
Out of smoldering eye sockets.



So bloody and vibrant is my
White whale.
So Reasoned and worn
My albatross
Open from torn
Worn out and prostrate
Is the whore who would
Bear my daughter.

Complicated, generous,
Self destructive and honest
that is the face I’ve picked
It is lthe ighthouse I have hit
It is the coast I emerge upon
Choked up and free.
Study this walking journal
Written across the backside of my footsteps
And watch for my kind of destruction
the lesson I give
lies in tears and inability
in disappointment and vanity
stubborn survival
and the ultimate truth. . . .
There is no celebrating
Someone like me.

The Beautiful Process

There are promises made .

There were promises made.

Were promises made?

Today I wrote a poem

and then threw it away

I treated my poem

like you treated me

I made it

built it

then destroyed it

it felt good to control it

and it's funny

'cause I actually loved it

but

that did not stop me

from leaving it behind.

Mister's Lament

 There was not a soul around

That was his fault

He had run them all away

And very soon, he began

Frantically forgetting

Her scent so he

Groped his way up from bottom

Of the bottle

Hoping to catch cleverness

With the charm he once commanded.

He was broken by the realization that

her beauty had a way of burning riddled

truths and etching bitter honesty

into his mind

And with her had gone the balm of interaction

In her absence A deep silence was born in him

Gleaming like an animated ebony razor

Posed to cut out his tongue

The blade handle

Held images of wealthy merchants

Swallowing his future all pointing

To his lost women.

That woman was not shallow

And that one was notordinary.

Alas. 

Was there hope of redemption in

Caught realizations?

 Can there ever be an late epiphany?

He could shake the irrepressible despair

And broken promise of his existence

After washing up his mind

There was still only a

small ray of

compromised light that reached

his soul just enough to allow hime

to remember

that she had beauty and vigor

And with her had gone all interaction

His thoughts ran to fields of purple,

plains of Africa soaring on a dirty

kitchen floor

Grappling with speakeasy’s and cows

That became small pieces of his heart

beating wildly and he was confused

were these his memories?

This is fluttered legacy

News of her and her was not a hoax!!

So it must be real.

Sad roses and red gloves in the distance

Past the rain

he had become small in the aftermath

of their union

But the handful of footsteps

Left over from the beginning

Forced him to remember through the liquor

To remember where she sat and how she rocked

Finally everything seamed repulsive

Became a pool of stagnant letters

Quarrelling into deeper waters

Of obscenities

And upon remembering such stark naked

He tried to drown out

A hard screaming choked voice

Saying with hoarse authority

Well done. 

Spinning

Truth turns into maybe

And yes is an honest foundation

Candor and an open “it’s possible”

knows an in between

that reality can see through.

In the middle there is an admission

That gives away the bare minimum

And when pressed to veracity

Absolute tenacity in the throws

Of honesty covers up for the

Sake of modesty.

In all the “no’s”

I’ve ever known I’ve come

To this principled conclusion

We are stuck in what actually happened

And while we lay before us

That which is to come

We are bound by what may be.

A Possibility

Vivid like a daydream

I see an open glaring dazzling

Piece of tomorrow stuck is

“Whatever” and “I’m open to anything”.

I’ve too much virtue to be mad.

I’m too sick for anger.

so  with an honorable head nod

I acknowledge that a saint is a sinner

Who keeps on trying

Turns the tides of redemption

Stretched out like the horizon

Providing the timing for my

Personal anthem

That even the wicked get

More than they deserve.

In that chorus I pull

Out these three words

You weren’t enough.

Possibly it’s impossible

You ever could have been.

I could not bring the sum

Of words in total

Stacked on each other

To solid foundation us.

For I like it shortened.

I cut corners.

I fiddled with the wording.

And I am not surprised that

In the end

We could not properly stage

An authentic sincerity

 so we

were uninspired to even act

Like normal people.

Truth grows into wisdom.

And even though dishonesty

Tends to be more reliable

The next time I’m around a

“your lovely” and “your mine”

honor dictates I believe it.

Um it's not her it's you

Why do we do this?



Why? do we profess crazy shit to no good people and then blame them when it literally blows up in our faces?

If you dedicate yourself to someone is actively not trying to be about not one thing in 2011 this grand and fantastic fabulously rainbow and glitter filled year of our Lord then you should in fact probably go ahead and let that grenade WOOOOOOORK.

We as the soft hearted knights of romantic honor need to be more guarded with our affections. There are some people out there who are genuinely not ready for our favor and that is really ok. Everyone gets on the bus in his or her own time. No rush HOWEVER, what Black Jesus has taught me this year is that if someone is pressing snooze in life you need to get YOUR ass up and go about YOUR day.

If someone keeps hurting your feelings then you want your feelings hurt. If someone keeps walking all over you then you like footprints on your back.

Love your neighbors without loosing yourself. Help your friends without risking yourself. Guard your humanity for it can be lost and damaged and it is a bitch to get back.

Prophet in music.

NO Adele.
No I don't want to remember. Thank you. But I appreciate you reminding me. Adele's album 21 makes me want her to be heartbroken for life. I feel like her in a healthy happy relationship might just be the worst thing to happen to my ipod. She hits the notes and presses lyrics into my mind that gives me the feeling that Black Jesus came down from heaven to save just me from myself.

"when was the last time you thought of me"
well shit. right now asshole. You know I can't erase you from my memory. I LOVED you dickhead. When you love someone they take a piece of you with them when they stomp out of your life with your heart in the bottom of their shoe.

Adele is that kind of artist who makes me KNOW for sure that I am not alone in my loneliness and despair. She let's me know that it's ok that I'm handicapped in love.

She throws all of her inadequacies out on the table and is bare and raw and real and humble and brave and indignant all at the same time.

" But I know I have a fickle heart, and a bitterness, and a wondering eye and a heaviness in my head . . .but don't you remember? The reason you loved me before? Baby please remember. . .me. . .once more. . ."

And you know WHY my heart is fickle? Why I'm a little bitter? Because of the LAST bitch who hurt my got damn feelings. Jesus is lesson learned. The Lord is a timid deer. He has brought me this far and he would like me to live to see a cure to my Lupus and that can't happen if I let my whole self get lost in love.

"You used to love me"

ha. Well. I also used to shit my pants. Really. And when I was a child I did childish things but then I because a woman and I put away the things of my childhood. (except for cartoons, and ice cream, and you know board games).

"You used to love me"

maybe you still do. Maybe I still love you. But on all that is holy and Tina Turner's wig just because you love someone doesn't mean you need to BE with them. And that is the lesson that is being eased into my the soft place at the base of my skull behind my ears with THIS song.

And thaaaaaaaaaaat is the point isn't it.  that's the entire entirety wholistic all inclusive point of it. Isn't it? The reason we break up with people. There is ALWAYS a reason. but then we break up and we fall in love again 10 minutes after that door shuts and in those quiet moments we turn to that empty space in the bed and we think to ourselves wait . . . Why are they gone? OR we deal with someone who has left us and we have to fight every adult instinct in our body to not beg them to come back. Some of us don't fight, and we do beg but really that is rarely successful.

Adele is brilliant in her honest portrayal of a broken relationship and the truth of something that cannot and should not be fixed. Memories fad and bad memories sometimes fad the quickest. For those of us who have suffered trauma at the hands of loved ones this is a blessing but we must be vigilant. Faded memories should never lead to ignorance and repetition of the mistakes that lead to heartbreak.

This isn't a blog. I'm just having a good hair week.

Poetry and Me

“Poetry is not a luxury “~ Audre Lorde 

What if words have soul potential?

What if words are capable of curing maladies one letter at a time

We just haven’t figured out how to “work” them yet?

What if words have a real and bitter

first kiss cosmic wormhole cool breeze

Summer sunlight promise?

What if words have veins and bleed?

What if every word is pregnant

With starlight and sunsets

Moonshine and rising tides?

My voice knows

That words can cast kingdoms

Built on veranda’s with no

Houses surrounded by moats

With no dragons.

My words throw keys

That unlock emotions

And rip through silence

With the vision of necessity

What if words could pull terror

To its knees?

Wake up addicts from their haze?

Words were meant to be a crutch

And free papers

Ice and a torch

Poetry is meant to be a

Traveling foundation

And the Bard,

The Bard is meant

To be the vessel

Where dignity swells up

Puffs out

And leaks through

The Bard smears emotions across lines, and stages, and

Crowds

And the sentiment creeps into minds

And through ears tickling spines

In a back and forth vertical motion

With familiarity

You see Poetry lives through me

But it’s owned by no one

Poetry is truly free.

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” 

I was not born a poet but I made to be one. The first time I heard (not just listened to)

 poetry I was 15 years old. Staying with my Uncle Jeff in California and I saw a show called Def Poetry Jam on HBO.



I was mesmerized. It was rap without the music. It was hip hop at it’s core. It was beautiful and it lit up my soul. Every hair follicle stood on end and my toes stretched towards the screen. Poetry entered me that day and made a home in my heart.

Then I started to see poetry. In song lyrics:

I didn't mean to take up all your sweet time...
I'll give it right back to you, one of these days
- - - Jimi Hendrix

In movie dialogue:

The jail you planned for me is the one you're gonna rot in.
---Celie in The Color Purple 

In Jamaican sayings/proverb:
He who feels it knows it

I saw poetry in dance:



 And for the first time I saw my world in the colors God painted them in. . . .

Audre says that, “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free”

My poems are my diary. What I can't say I will often write. My Poems will ideally out live me. They explain me and understand me. My poems love me and share me. They are a privilege and a honor. They were never mine to keep. When I don’t write for an extended period of time I find myself uncomfortable, unhappy and off balance. That is because I have poems that are constantly boiling up within me that need to be released.

I am a knight of expression and I place my armor on a round table of dreams and lyrics. My quest is a journey of self discovery and revolutionary dialogue. I am a warrior of passion. I leave the memories of battle laid our in verse so that I may project the truth of mankind which is neither good or bad but real.

I am a wisdom hunter. Thirsty for knowledge. Brave in desire and constantly weaving fantasy into the perception I chose to dispense among my brethen.

Poetry is not a luxury for me. It is sacred calling that combines faith, glory, honesty, gods, love, everything sublime and everything degrading into something divine. With the passing of Gil Scott-Heron I have found my footing again and my writing has increased exponentially. Art is often the mother of change. If I want to be the change I want to see in the world then I have to see myself as an artist with the potential to change the world. It's really that simple and that got damn hard.

Vanity

Love does not hurt. Love loves you first and then waits for someone to catch up to you.

That is a TRUTH I had to learn the hard way. While living in Cleveland I have met, dating, flirted with, and obsessed over an array of interesting women. Often these women were not worthy of the beauty and artistry I bring to a relationship because they themselves had nothing comparable to offer. They were ill fitted for me because I am interested in being a complete human being and I struggle to fulfill that purpose. The women I chose were not.

The women I sought relationships with have been poorly suited for me in that they were not successful in trying to be their true selves. I do not judge them for this. I do not pity them nor do I blame them for the consequences of our failed encounters. My choice is potential mates says more about ME than it does about THEM. I am supposed to be a Diva of art and change.

I chose these women because I was afraid of my potential. I was afraid of what I could achieve with the right person by my side. When you live your right life

My historic line-up consists of: the girl who swings from lovers like Tarzan swings from trees; the girl who changes soul mates like I change socks; the girl who has a girlfriend but needs more attention so she seeks a mistress; the girl who wakes up every morning promising to be a better person, fails, then gets up the next day promising the same thing; the girl who loved me only when she was drunk; the girl who loved me as a filler for the girl she would rather be with; the girl who loved me for my money (HA jokes on her); and lastly and unfortunately most significantly the one who left me torn, brushed, beaten, by way of violent mental illness and antagonism disguised as love.

Thankfully after all of these failed experiments I eventually learned how be the lover I was meant to be. Not for anyone else but for me. I needed to be broken and emptied so that a true essence of  self appreciation grow inside of me. That enchantment could only fill me up after I had been ripped apart and gutted.

Grace came to me in a whisper with a slow purpose.  It soothed me after my love turned hard and gray. Grace reminded me that poetry is a savior and words are my shield. Grace was a hail of wood and dust that came crashing down on my head and flashed in front of my face like a rainbow of brown faces with high cheekbones and wide smiles. Grace walks like family and smells like home. Grace was my older brother asking me “where is she now. . .because I just want to "talk"” reminding me that I always have more than just myself.

Grace told me that love may be difficult, it may require work, it can be loud and tedious and obnoxious but it does not scare or frighten and it does not ever hurt. If your love hurts it is not love but a shell of the emotion mutated by fear and it should be pitied and shunned.

Our true selves deserve more and better. Our true souls recognize the energy that seeks to protect us and embraces it. When we try to fit harmful energy into our lives we bring our world into disarray and we find ourselves off balance. This lack of balance permeates into every aspect of our existence and ultimately causes the mutated melancholy we now know as depression. I have found a place for Melancholy in my life and I have embraced the moments of sadness for the wisdom that follows. create brilliant art. 

I look to the artists:

Charles Schulz

and

And Nina Simone.             

They conversed regularly with Melancholy and used it to create wonderful art and inspired millions with their work.

I have found a purpose in focusing on the future and I find that using them as a beacon is both comforting and steadying. I too will go Melancholy’s table and I will leave my worries there. If I give proper deference and show enough bravery I might just be able to leave with a piece of wisdom because I have a feeling my Sadnesss does not want me to go away empty handed.   

The gift No

After the music stopped

I place my ego

On a muted alter

Conceded defeat

and left my armor

for the next suitor

I removed the love from my

eyes and knelt in the void

left on the floor of my mind

there beneath my knees

are the scraps of our history

we who were once

Two stars a budding comet

Poised to rip through

Cushion of normality

Stalled by an average reality

And plagued by the treasure

Of stability

where love has opened us

it exposes the lining of our

souls, the brightness of

the moons circling our hearts

and plays the notes

of galaxies

roaming lazy through

our bodies

 

we were mates in mind only

fool in happiness

for moments spinning

on a pinhead

and every second was brilliant

every minute sweet

regrets were infinite

oh but the journey

was sure a blinding

treat is not a exercise

I'm eager to repeat