The Dead Emcee Scrolls
Page 8
Just now.
Just now.
Just now.
Just now.
Just now.
Mixed emotion
Contrived commotion
Natural struggle
Lead-filled sacks
On non-burdened backs
Finding the time to love
In the midst of chaos
It birthed us, nourishes us
We live in it and for it
If we were free
We’d fight for the freedom
To recreate it.
Who’s your master?
Your dreams of disaster
Nightmares of freedom
Fantasies of fantasies
Which you claim we have no time for
Because we’re being choked?
Well, what if time ceased to be time?
How would that affect your tomorrows of freedom?
Where would that leave us, today?
Would you then find the time to inhale and exhale
And wear those hands around your neck
As a necklace, accessorizing your
Newfound suit of
Mixed emotion
Contrived commotion …
… infinity
How can I escape this cycle?
Must I turn with the world
In the direction it dictates?
Am I the wind’s slave?
As instruments come to life with breath
The wind sends my high notes
To indigo communions
With Coltrane’s Favorite Things
This is my body, which is given for you
This is my blood which is shed for you
My love, like the wind, uncaged,
Blows time into timeless whirlpools
Transfiguring fear and all of its subordinates
(possession, fear, jealousy)
into crumbling dried leaves
My love is the winds slave
and, thus, is free
my love is the wind that is shaped
as it passes through the lips of earthly vessels
becoming words of wisdom
songs of freedom or simply hot air
my love is the wind’s song:
if it is up to me, I’ll never die
if it is up to me, I’ll die tomorrow
one thousand times in an hour
and live seven minutes later.
If it’s up to me, the sun will never
Cease to shine and the moon will
Never cease to glow
And I’ll dance a million tomorrows
In the sun rays of the moon waves
And bathe in the yesterdays
Of days to come
ignoring all of my afterthoughts
And pre-conceived notions.
If it is up to me, it is up to me.
And, thus, is my love
Untainted, eternal.
The wind is the moon’s imagination
wandering.
It seeps through cracks, explores the unknown,
Ripples the grass.
My love is my soul’s imagination.
How do I love thee?
Imagine
And will I now forget everything that I have read? Will I not now attempt to actualize the glimpses of a higher reality that I have experienced? What did Siddhartha teach me? And Azaro? And all of the other spirit children? And the insights? Have they not all laid the groundwork for this new de/con/struction of self?
I have learned the importance of stories, the importance of dreams (night and day), the need to look beyond mirrors, the flow of energy, the hindrances of “control dramas,” the inconsistencies of time, the inaction that self-consciousness leads to, the reality of the “unreal,” the universal source of energy, the beauty of all things, the unity of all things, that coincidences aren’t, that love cannot be specified (kinda), the ineptitude of belief, death only comes to those who believe in it, life only comes when you’re not reading, writing, or thinking about it. “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
I could inhale your existence
And exhale your dreams
And this room would be filled
With things that only seem
Your mind’s on permanent rewind
Trying to make it fast forward
Press record, listen,
Beyond what you hear
Pre-occupation with time
Is pre-occupation with fear
“Looking at my Gucci it’s about that time”
the tick tock of clocks padlock your mind
capital centered on your left wrist
your reality is twisted, unreal
capital is not center
time is undefined
as soon as you define it it’s a new time
but with unchanging minds
new times become same times
why blame time for bad times or sad times
sometimes I forget time
and exist on my own time
I own time
The concept exists in my own mind
And mind is eternal
That concept defeats time
So I climb …
1995
African - American
Drumbeat - For money
Where I live
Music notes take the form
Of dollar signs
Souls sing backup
While material desires
Sing solo
Somewhere between self-hate and Brooklyn
I sit on a mountain of green-leafed questions
Searching for balance in the mist
I used to rock beats over lunch room tables
Now I’m searching for balance in the midst
And I find bliss in mental tugs of “what for?”
’cause they make me think I’m deep
Raising dead questions like a grammatical visionary
Who can only see the past in the future
Come one come all
I can make the blind walk
“And I run through discotheques like sound.”
Figuring I’m bound to hear something
That I can nod my head to
But everything is “For the killers
And the Hundred Dollar-Billers”
And “Real Niggas who ain’t got no feelings”
I got mad feelings
And stay broke
Too broke to buy a magnum
Or a state of mind
To help my thoughts go platinum
I was discovered by Gold
Mined and marketed as meat
Erased of my memories
So I’d have the freedom to think
I discovered that which discovered me
And then made it my God, mistakenly
I take shots of molasses
So I can slow my existence
And feel the world
Spinning on its axis
I want to feel revolution
For myself
Fuck the Franz Fanon books on the shelf
I mean, really,
I just want to dance
’cause I remember when
We used to back spin and windmill
Breakbeats wouldn’t let niggas stand still
We’d feel the music
Begin to swipe and spin
’til we were dizzy
From revolution
On the dance floor
They call dancing primitive.
They call singing senseless.
Some have forgotten to hum.
They are too busy with the
“how to” and “why.”
My culture will never die.
It lives in the wind.
“… and the very rocks will cry out.”
Skyscrapers will fall
Your lack of understanding
Will crush you down to “primitive.”
Maybe all of us.
We all travel the same road. Alone.
Blinded by the brightness of darkness, I stepped forward into a world where shadows precede breath. I could feel all of my pores opening to the point of being enveloped by openness: a black whole. Being entered by the many colors of darkness, the bows that precede the rain, as humid as the center of a raindrop, I began to orbit my new realm. There was no looking back.
I had no eyes. But language dictated that I saw. I was all eyes just as I was all else. Surrounded by a darkness that held the unmuted intensity of every color in its shadow. We were one and millions.
My name. Somebody was calling my name. I saw no one. Then I realized that that which I was hearing as my name wasn’t, but was the sound of unmuted colors gathered in the wind, swirling against time. The sound of bright resonant darkness. The sound of orphan shadows rejoicing in the light. And that was my name. It was all of our names. And I, too, joined in the calling.
I perform biopsies
On cyclopses
So that I might better understand
My third eye
Dissecting words
May be clever
But I aim to live verbs
To be
Calculating the distance
From here to forever
The square root of me is circular
But such calculations
Are a waste of time
And pre-occupation with time
Is a waste of life
But what am I
Supposed to do
With this calculator?
1996
Too many caged birds
Sing of dreams deferred
Too few chance beyond
The Maya of these hues
Siblings of soil
Soiled and shunned
Gather your seeds
A garden of guns
Armored archaic
Garnished by sun
Guiltlessly growing
A garden of guns
Petalled with passion
Tended by nuns
Target tomorrow
A garden of guns
An un-aimed bullet
Shot in a storm
Maimed the magician’s
Rabbit as he performed
In his dream. In his dreams
He seldom fails. He knows
The magic of the close-eyed
Angels who cast spells on
The nightfall’s descent.
This night was like no other.
All dreams were aimed and blunt.
All children saw the rabbits appear
Out of nothing.
The void of the magicians hat.
Sitting on the steps
Of wood creeks and song
Dust blown and driven
By journeys too long
Ancient decrepit spiders of space
Eight-legged infinity
Webbed wisdoms brown face
Capital trades slave
Manhood’s maroon
Captive of conscience
Freedoms’ buffoon
Maybe at noon
Maybe right now
Never to know
Ancient as sound
Highest vibrations
Unheard untraced
Ghetto’s Gibran
Sneakers unlaced
I am a powerless vessel. A reed of the wind. One of many. There is no genius of my own. Speak through me.
Now, why do wish to be spoken through? Is it so I can receive credit for that which comes through me? If that's the case then I am not ready to be spoken through. Not until it is learned that there is no credit for me to bathe my vanities. I would taint the cleansing waters. Not until I lose all sight of audience for my sake should I have audience for your righteousness never to be forsaken.
I am simply attempting to master the art of losing myself in everything in which I can invest myself
Self evacuation procedures to follow in case of ego:
Yes, the black gold of the sun
Father of Saturn
Descendent of Run
Spoonie not Biggie
Ill beats and bass
You know my case number
1,2,3,4,5,6,7
Father reverend
Mother star
Carlos gypsy
These all who I are
Stars of the sky
In relation to the eye
Third child
Of the mind of Duce
Sketched on the drawstrings
Of a noose
The descendent
Of ill beats and choruses
The llamas be Michaels
The scarabs be Horus’
And if I could Van Gogh these vanities
So that I may display artistically
The hell where I dwell, egotistically
Yo, I’d transcend physically
And become the sun
To make picturesque
This souls arson
Son, you’ll never shine
Until you find your moon
To bring your wolf to a howl
So fetch your cows and spoons
It doesn’t matter
What I say anymore
I am the solstice of a union
U and I verse the world
And I have the power
To bring rain from the sun
And radiance from the moon
Blessed be the womb
Complex theories
To discover simplicity
Abstracted illusions
The problem with chemistry is biology
The problem with biology is physics
The problem with science is metaphysics
Killed by your theories of death …
1997
Prisons be like magnets
Attracting delinquent habits
Maybe that’s why niggas
Steel wheels spinning
To counter the attraction
Spray my name on steel horses
To loosen the reins
Cry the eyes of a thousand storms
Galloping o’er the clouds
Chariots of the morn
Foot soldiers of the wind
Handmaidens of the dawn
The archers are aimed at the unnamed
The rain-bows and arrows
Truth is bloodstained
Yet, Brutus is an honorable man
’Though he has Caesar’s blood on his hands
And he claims that his palms are bleeding
But no doves grace the sky of his eyes
And the sun still must set in the west.
By no means the darkest ray of the sun
A shaman of shadows
Cast your net in my lungs
And reap the dreams of my breath
Of these hymns seldom sung
Black’s the gift
To be young
To be young
Dreams deferred
So Ray-sinned in the sun
I sold clouds in a rainless season
Nickel bags, dimes of rhyme and reason
As if clouds were treason
The warden storms
Through wintered cells
Avalanched rhetoric
Me and reason rebel
My mind’s consciousness in a snowsuit
My third eye strapped in ski boots
They crucified their Lord on snowboards
The iceman cometh
Plug the sun in
A hundred Miles’ trumpets
And runnin
With the music
Loop the drumbeat
Tambourine gone?
Shake your shackles
I’m handcuffed to the sample machine
Shoot the sheriff and throw me the key
Bull’s eye
Blood shot
Matadors of the wind
I’m charged
With possession of illegal substance
But my substance
Makes eagles of the ill
1987?
A story of self-remembering. Season and Claire are connected through many past-life experiences. The old man who approaches Season in the beginning of the poem is Season as an old man. So, Season as a young boy meets Season as an old man, and slowly young Season makes the connection.
Claire (short for Clairvoyance): her great grandfather sacrificed the family’s clarity for gold in the late 1800s.
They are each other’s eternal reflection: reflection eternal.
It is the story of a vortex that opened in 1987 and its effect on 2 people. The story of 2 people who begin to remember their past lives and their relation to history and the future in order to prepare the world for its oncoming destruction/evolution: the rains.
They stood and waited on the seafloor. It had been written that their number would be two score and nine. Dead man float. The living found new life three miles beneath the boat.
He had been drowning for a day or two. He could no longer see the sky he left behind when he looked from whence he fell. He floated in the face of darkness, never noting when that face became his own. He knew the city, still below him, was his birthplace. He held his breath with dreams of living a million deaths from home. He had been told that he would see its sky beneath him, yet he saw no clouds. He took note of the clouded forms through which he drifted. The sleeping woman had been the first. Her resonant purr had been the birth of earthquakes. She floated alone in the darkness …
He drifted deeper.
The faint sound of a drum could be heard.
The city stood in shades of blue, gated by the dreams of those living high above in a world inhabited by those who never knew of the ones that swam beneath them.
He stood facing the wall of dreams, deciphering the master key from the mystery.
She took from the ocean
With wings of water
Sea-feathers flapped weather
Waved worlds blue girls …
And soon the dungeons
Became crystal caves
Where light prisms
Un-prisoned slaves
And we basked in our own reflections
And sought new ways to channel
Our light
A child is born in the ghetto
Only three toes
And a finger nailed
To crosses street to
Avoid trouble
Carries cowries in his knapsack
And a book of things to come
Keeps his soul inside his sneaker
Ties his laces with his tongue