What does it mean to give up ones arms for a better life, a better future, a better way to imagine? Time travel is real and it depends on our ability to go to places no one ever wants to go. I have traveled through time before and I have made my circuit around the sun. For 40 days we are promised to find our fortune in the famine. We listened to the song over and over and could not make out the meaning, “stretch repeat so thin it fades”[fred moten]. Something is coming.
w|ndow
“In the history of English poetry, the window has often been conceived of as a figure for imagination, as a kind of lenses through which we see, through which we envision. Part of what is at stake is, 'to fix a broken window,' is to fix another way of imagining the world. To literally fix it, to destroy it, to regulate it, to exclude it, to incarcerate it. But also, at the same time, to incorporate it, to capitalize upon it, to exploit it, to accumulate it. This State can't live with us, and they can't live without us. It is important to recognize too that the broken window, the alternative-unfixed-window through which we see the world, is not just the way in which we see something which doesn’t exist. It is also the way we see and imagine that which does exist. It is important to imagine how things might be otherwise, but it is also really, really important to understand and to see who and what we are right now. Because I think they see who and what we are.” ___Fred Moten
P|er ||, "sh|ps at a d|stance have..."
dear | 0 | V, when d|d you become so fragi|e?
How long do we get to be considered “fragile” before our bones actually bear? After surviving years of gossamer fragility, do we still truly own the denial of fortitude, the right to remain silent, and the promise that feart or danger will destroy us? As I continue to hold the ceramics of my circumstance with caution, and offerings worth 40 days and 40 nights of hunger, is the value of my testimony still shattered mirrors, 7 years of bad luck, and horrid superstition? If my misery made it all this way, insofar as I have gone nowhere, will my back still splinter? Will anything at all fracture?
After all of this, from –10,121,990 back to Zero, and the absolute value of this “whole long ass [sheet] of improper names”, busted sneakers, and an Odyssey from the equator to America,
are you still destined to shatter from the fall?
To drop with such a distance away from the possibility of repair?
Fragility is an exponent truth, denied each moment you manage to keep it all together.
doma|n
i revel in the fact that my backyard is a channel into the Atlantic. there is something not so quotidian about taking in the ocean during a time where separation and apartheid define who we need to be in order to survive. in order to survive, separation and apartheid must define who we are okay with becoming.
|9 coveted [COVID] journal read | april 19, 2014
it tells me that im doing something right… i founded my talk (retrospectively) on my work as prophecy. not just because “what a song can do” made sense with the completion of my project, but also because i am the prophecy. how can i trust that someone else would have found these notes and at the same time, also find it urgent to have them read. what other student would have had the same respect for the notes of our mothers. was my mother training me for the kind of work i have been called to do?
D|e
D. I(E)NFERNÖ-22
by JiDEH
there are some people in this world that hold mythological powers that make you believe that you could jump from the 11th floor and make it out alive. no, there are people in this world that make you believe that you could breath under water and live eternally. & sure, the lord/e has risen and the sun has fallen but there are people in this world that you will meet that will make you believe (even if only through guilt alone) that you, a mortal, can save the dead. a passionate assertion that bullets aren’t rea|, that murder is a myth, that the story was really just gossip, a rumor, a scandal, a farce. and here i am, writing through my loss and here you are, reading through whatever you can find.
“im so sorry, have we met?”//
“no, i’m just a friend of a friend that tried to save the dead man in the coffin.”//
“terrible isnt it?”//
“they said he was shot 5 times and that he had no business in Brooklyn anyways.”//
“well, the more you know the more you grow.” //
“where should i leave the flowers? there actually already dead but aren’t they just the prettiest thing, I would hate for them to just go in the trash.” //
“oh, ill take them, ill make sure they stay alive… well, whatever life is left in them.”//
empath|c
"i'm finishing this piece of my bargain ... the shape of which, i have no idea... i'm saying this about the very artifact of who i have been."
empathy –– which is to say the qualitative response to the external ––is not so much about my inability to "feel" how you are "feeling" this tuesday afternoon. really, it is my own capacity to feel––and more so to inhabit (or to live-by [livethroughby])––the very things you did not know you wanted me to feel. empathy is an alternative consciousness that converts horizontal sentimentalities into vertical orientations of spiritual and para-natural powers. horizontal touches and transient moments of afterthought are all very real and deliberate lapses of the empathic. "i feel this means something," or "i think i've seen you before," or "something you said really spoke to me," are all iterations of your empathic connection to the world. cultivate this gift, live through these feelings, and bargain with the off chance that this feeling is meant to create or nourish something living within each of us.
the man that sold me soap from Jordan
the investigators that question your integrity
the preacher that sends you on a blind journey
the mother that didn’t believe your lie
the crazy lady on the bus with your story to te||
first they ki||ed my father
and i guess that it is possible that such a provocative story could be told in such uncertain circumstances, in no uncertain terms. that, the conditioning of fear's lifetimes would drive you to terminal vagrancies and catastrophes impossible to forgive over generations of imagined given names. what kind of decisions and indecisions could compete with such risky contemplations between life and possibility, freedom and restraint. this was a story i am still learning to process through my own transient moments of decisions and indecisions of compassion, regret, disappointment, inspiration, and fear. it really is a temporal function.
easy |iving
conservative
I don't want to trouble the waters. I don't want anything. I don't want to rest my head, left the ones that left for dead. and tomorrow I'll do it all again. I don't want that at all, no. My hands are shaking my voice grown confused of what is wrong and what is punishable. who will say the truth when they are called on to report the facts of what happened? what if they only wanted a touch, a nod, a semblance of recognition? what if I don’t want their structure(s) to fall.
monsters inc.
i have invested a lifetime in writing the perfect character. without question, i made sure it was a Thing everyone could hate. this villein was real. i could feel it breathing life into my passionate utterances against the state, the institution, the americas, the slave. it was my failed relationships, my failed accomplishments, she was everything i promised myself i could live without. this monster was so real that i began to write her into the lives of those close to me––taking over like grey goo. the comedy of it all is that the villein is really something in ourselves. a psychological trick, a scapegoat, an excuse to hold everyone else accountable. the monster was/is incorporated.
the political economy of information
what haunts us most is not the professorial acquisition of data, information, knowledge, technology & power. instead, it is the dangers such distribution temps and the inherent risk pandora tigers in our imaginations. i learned something new today that shakes my value(s). do i share this information? do i dialectically synthesize or materialize my research to antagonize my status quo? do i internalize my findings toward my own will to power? the information and the reality it bears is not the challenge --I will never forget what i learned today as i commemorate its happening here today. what is the relationship between glory and information? will, or should, this information impact the body of my work?