I sincerely hope you enjoy this one. It was a pleasure to write, and Scott-Heron’s vocals ride high on a wave of tru-skool, no-BS house music.
[POEM] 7th WUNC Piece
Ramadan is the lunar month when Muslim’s fast from sunrise to sunset
No food or water
Distancing yourself from the material world is meant to recharge you spiritually
Many have given up more than food and water this year
I can’t imagine how Mabruka Mbarki must have felt
the first month without her 16 year old son
after he was killed by police,
his memory lives on in songs of those who stood by him in protest
My mother used to tell me
how much it bothered her when people would
avoid mentioning my sister’s name after she passed away
So I understood when Mrs. Mubarki
thanked us profusely just for asking to hear her son’s story
To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine—
just a lightbulb
and a potbelly,
greyhaired,
and glad to have
the room.
… in the morning
they’re out there
making money:
judges, carpenters,
plumbers, doctors,
newsboys, policemen,
barbers, carwashers,
dentists, florists,
waitresses, cooks,
cabdrivers …
and you turn over
to your left side
to get the sun
on your back
and out
of your eyes.
“
| — | bukowski, poem for my 43rd birthday (via speakmnemosyne) |
Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolescence ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.
“
| — | Truman Capote, Too Brief a Treat (via human-voices) |
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!—Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
gross domestic project
With every choice made comes unknowable chance.
There’s a million risks worth taking.
But only once voice, from all the millions
that it takes to assert an individual’s rights,
will be heard. This is absurd!
`
This is how the tide turns.
This is how a nation earns its stripes;
its stars fall into its bread
which its citizens break over
coffee and change, jingling,
like the tingling feeling you get
when you feel you’re being watched.
toes
I often feel as though I get my toes stepped on a lot. I’m terrible at explaining myself, because my instincts are never guided by immediate circumstances in relation to which I could pose my perspectives. Memory moves through me like ice. My heart beats like a skipping stone on water’s surface. I vaporize as soon as I get the chance. Why? To dance at the periphery, unseen. To dream of every pair of eyes that never let mine in, to grin at God delightedly while immersed neck-deep in sin. I step barefoot from moment to moment, and I often feel as though I get my toes stepped on a lot. I’m terrible at explaining myself.
older than sunset
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Try not to contemplate
how living in the moment tips you to a hopeless state
try not to respirate
try not to try – right, why?
not to pry but why can’t I lie beside you tonight?
I’d rather lose sight
than out of love lose you.
I muse. You’re muse to me.
You’re music, you’re this slick-topped sea
I walked with you on such a thing
so long ago, many melodies ago.
Compelled to be freer than dreamstate we prate on
of this of that while blackening skies
fly imagery by
that you and I ought translate.
I spake. I spat. I whittle words for you
colder than the rain
older than sunset
we’re our best yet, by faith or bet
terrestrial waves of regret
shed lives over.
