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.