The shapes in the darkness had histories. Falling out of windows failing to become mayor of their mothers’ universes. We must work together, put on the right brightness. The clothes. Our robes and gowns. Stop killing each other, wheel to face the actual Killers.
I wanted to do this and wheel. And wheel. And wheel. And be. And couldn’t. Monkees walked on my fingers. People misunderstood. In such a short space, to rise. To float. To be the other. Above the skin. Bones tossed, left. A will in the left of the desk, in a brown envelope. Do not dispute what is there. Of light and despair.
To keep from thinking, which is evil. Sky does not think. Nor trees. To stand at the edge of that feeling because I couldn’t use it. Instead I’d be in Alabama with the fire. In the shadow thrown dancing by the cracker’s ego. And them. They’d get their shit together and try to leave. They’d try to throw it all out. They’d try to start again. And grown children, who one day will be faced with the same prerogatives, the same alternatives. The same lies, and crisscross. Trying to grow. Trying to be good people. God people. God men, and Women of the earth and sky.
* * *
The telephone rings and it is a friend of mine. Who talks smoothly and softly about things I am interested in. To back and take away your yes from, your eyes from, the event. The torture and manhoodmaking. The final step with hands open, and eyes open, to embrace whatever. I could not get angry at the tortured. I could only hate myself. And love them beyond their knowledge, and they rise anyway. They reach anyway. They make their moves, as I make mine. But at the level of each his separate adjustment to being God. To being owners of all that there is.
* * *
Many years ago I wanted to be myself. And still I walk that same line. This man whose life I watched. Whose soul is mine, and another’s. This child beaten for his love and his stupidity. In the earth fire wind of the era of our captivity. When we dressed like beasts and walked into enclaves of suffering like cowboys. Hair glued separately, identifying the part of the world we’d been oppressed in. Dirt and dust, and torn pants. And big eyes blacked and tossed dumbly to the ground, and held by our friends from the final killing and disappearance into the woods of life. Where the sweet fruit and inner adventure is. My lovely woman with me, in long green and softness. She stands there smiling, with me, now, forever, as something turns colors and sweetens the forest itself.
But in a stark black and white tube. With my brothers and sisters on benches for sale. And the beasts themselves darting in and out inside, in their capes and revenge. The machines. The rumbling insides of the robots. Inside her “chest” the motors whirr . . . “NUrse NURSE,” the name she responds to, stumble-walking toward us, rotting Kate Smith, hands outstretched the mummy a missionary to help us, to cover us over with dirt, again, but we rise through, flowers, in bright colors, even trampled we rise and hug the sun and sky and are strong, believe me, strong.
My brother stands there beat and bleary eyes. His friends with him shambling, a rude group, a motion, a place in the universe. “We demand to be loved. We demand to be alive. We demand to be looked at like human beings. We demand that we are always so beautiful. And dirty. And bent. And drunk. And ignorant. And praying to mover of universe. To the east or the west or the south or the north or the pointless no place in space world of loves and adventure. All place are us and God, and we demand in the death shadow of the yellowow world, something for ourselves. Our friend here is hurt. Is injured. Help him, lady.”
And he stands there with his opening of the sweater, and his droopy pants, and shows the stab wounds. The blood and tearing gap. His heart just beneath it, throwing the blood to the top.
* * *
in the sticks in the sticks in the flying thin money for somebody dirt a lot of us lived together through this. You read the newspapers? Have you seen that statue of Lincoln? How it’s turned green? You walk down there near the jew with the busted head. In the army navy store. And the pimps in sam johnson hoods bending so cool. Fulla punks of the universe in exactly the same order as we.
There were the neighbors and whoever lived here. With us. Whoever passed through in sinister laments. Pointing the shadows, conducting their own adventures. They’d hurt, and look in the mirrors of our silence with big shoes, stomping the music book a blue stamp a final agony for the soul gone weak in the seas.
He was a man who’d glued himself to that life. His hat, and rolly girth, a speech like that, and himself flying toward a basket, not sure of the shot, but the power was definitely hip. We are the zigzags of our own design. Is it secret? Are they walking the streets each night with hands in their pockets to see God? Or what? I mean why are we here, if you don’t know, sit down, be calm, zippppppppp.
I couldn’t be but sitting here seeing and hearing. Like phones and pointed grimaces, white dudes answering the no for our lives. I couldn’t walk stupid or unfeeling or in hip germany, forever. It was my own life. I looked at it. Watched it in other people’s eyes. It was nothing to me but real.
So what can I say to remember? The smooth thing, you think you want. You want to label me. Describe me finally for an elk.? “Why yes, you fool.”
* * *
I saw (that) man. The drifts of his life. In sequence. A dance a masquerade of effects who which were will who plys the place, moving. Exact any trip. Back. Exact any trip. The same. And no fooling no lying to the lord the god of ooooooooooo his own foreverforce . . .
I thought I was talking to a schoolteacher and wanted to explain something for him to teach. When someone asks me to react. When I do. It’s not for real. It’s lower than that. Tilted somehow, black people. I know what I want to see, am the only one . . . but he passed, he passed. he’s slow his taught his is a moving being of the one thought the one the one.
This is an exact crevice. This is a sunrise like seeing the logic of the white castle. The hamburgers and gauze hats and little cups of coffee and orange drink. the slavery. I know these girls want something to fill them up. they can’t long so need so much leap out of themselves to grab at the essence of life. They are always.
The gas talks. Water, solids. Animals. Understand the total meaning of the world. Understand what men are for. What they will be. If he could crawl up the street waving his arms and drunk with the idea of loss, drag himself up, and think about the giants he warred against, and and what and crack it, oh god what have i done?
This is the silhouette of the man. The flashes of light. Signals from the future evolutions, the future worlds that we will be there. What we make and are, we long for our strength, as a completion of the energy we project.
Now and Then
This musician and his brother always talked about spirits. They were good musicians, talking about spirits, and they had them, the spirits, and soared with them, when they played. The music would climb, and bombard everything, destroying whole civilizations, it seemed. And then I suppose, while they played, whole civilizations actually were destroyed. Leveled. The nuns whimpered with church spears through their heads. Blind blond babies bled and bled. Dogs ate their mothers and television was extinct except the image burned in it forever, in the future soft museums of our surviving civilization. A black way. A black life. From the ways and roads of the black man living, surviving, being strong.
But when they stopped, the brothers, they were not that strong. Like any of us, the music, their perfection, was their perfect projection of themselves, past any bullshit walking around tied up unspiritual shit. They could be caught with white girls, and talk unintelligibly, or sometimes around one’s glasses a little sliver of white fear would idle, and he’d laugh it away, and talk about his music, shadowboxing, practicing his survival and perfection.
Mostly their peters slammed them, and brought them lower than themselves, or the need to live, like to have money, and be whole in the tincan halfassed sense the white man’s way, which he put on us, and is still so much a part of all our lives. (A man on the radio explaining black-power.)
I mean they could
only talk when they were not playing. As I can only talk, or feel the frustration of needing too. Of not sitting in the circle of circumscribed light. Reeling. Passing. (Like my dead lovely girl, passed, passed, passed, gone.) Getting into the next level of vision. Seeing and being. I want to go. I want to fly. Lift me spirit. Help me. Just talk. That’s all. With the tongue in the roof of my mouth. Just spirit. Nothing but. I hurt. I want. I need. All these endless flesh frustration categories. Which are only that. This is a saint. No place. This is a god. No where. This is a feeling. Me. I am all feeling. Here by the wet window burned in its tone. I am all the not being that my limit has set, not knowing yet my whole. Yet I do and can not speak with my entire spirit. Can not fly. Though I understand the need. The way. I do not can not be do are. Walls. Walls. Lie in the death of the almighty. Wishing.
Like I write to keep from talking, and try by that to see clear to where I must go. Chakra. Enlightenment. The seven lives. The many planetary adventures. Air fire water. Scale. Hung in the balance to see the deaths. Tell them horns. Tell them words. Tell them example of a man little man with big eyes went away came back grew loved made things died without point, in the history of no world and the world passed, the continent sank, and nothing but nothing was ever accomplished since everything was already done, and what more could be done.
The brothers cast shadows in the world, and tales were told about them. They told tales about themselves. One was short and one was tall. They scared a lot of people because they were new. They were spiritual. But not like Norman. Black Norman short brother brought to my house one afternoon, he was looking like the passer, like he knew more than any of us. “You think it’s about personalities.” He said that. “About personalities,” and the door swung open sunlight, no, nothing, came in, to the force of, to the heart of, my self. I cdn’t speak. You think it’s about personalities. You think it’s about your self. Whew. was in the air. I see him years later standing in a doorway on 125th street, the ways of men. Further out, gone, than any of us. Even now, with the wind of God blows through me. “Come on faggot,” his face turned on 130th street in that stance of hard ashy elbows, and read the deep cowardice of a wd be killer. All of the would be killers, cowards, and dancers with high fists, killing the village white killers. And the killer, JM, the soldier, subsided. To darkness of more fears, and another road he had to find, having seen the fire in Black Norman rage into heavens we know nothing of.
Black Norman was not always Black Norman either. He was weaker too. He was not always in the rain on the street in the doorway communing with God. He wanted money. He wanted his flesh. He thought he was strong sometimes (though in his weakest moments). God of Norman of God of where I touch. Feel this, and pass. All you dudes. Feel this, and pass.
But they, the brothers were pals of mine. Good friends, in a world of alligators and shitheads, lunatics, happy liars, cowards, white people. There was warmth. There was something done, in our inch. But God knows. God chooses whom he will. (Your prerogative, ol man, to call such, knowing the blue eyes of the will, of the days, of the number passing, all, such, and me, and the . . . heart stopped, girl, please, I want to know, where’s the door I came in yestiddy, where??? I cdn’t, don’t, and they look at me, I want . . . stop it, stoooopidt!)
My pals and me, against everything. It seemed. They made music like heaven’s bowels. I loved them in the sound. They loved women tho. Like Amos and Andy in the Harem of the Butchers. It was a conquest they thought about winning shit. Like boys. The tall one was all boy, a kid, really. Raw, like they say, of new kinda gunfighters type. The other rooted in a cleaner rhythm than the world around him, though he created the things that could weaken him. Responded. There are invisible allegiances in our bones. Things we must look at. Why? The smoke of smells. The web of things we’ve touched or seen. Womb-earth.
People can be corny at the same time they’re not. Can reach that? (Children line up against the wall and select your failure machine. He’s going down, wind, scarf badarf waves, hello clancey jackson sits on the steps looking at the girl, can grow, the g clef vibrates hairs pussies, conglomerates of afternoon triumphs, evening walks across the floor, as beautiful. They want to be Gods. We must desire god and his ism.
(I can describe one guy tall with a large adam’s apple. With wirerim glasses and sneaky smile. Sneaky high up there, pardner? Har to breaf???
The other more flash gordon without the popsicle. Maybe a joint sometime. Whenever. And a white tuft of sparks thrust out his lower jaw.
This is the scandal of a small town that all the stupid people are the same as in a big town, so they seem stupider. Dig?? So the lovers, seem, S-O-M-E-H-O-W, loveier (is that a category of human espresso??)
Sometimes they looked like Batgroup unemployed. No place, like, to hover. (In all honesty, this is a one-way street, come back, the shit’s changed. Evolver, which is different from revolver, which has long hair and kills. Even in song.)
“Black People We Must Take Over This Planet As The Prime Possessors Of Natural Energies.” Red Hook always wanted them to write a song with that as the title, but they didn’t when I was “knowin’dem” (a description of bat-street, in back of the sixteenth dead president, in bronze and the key to the city in the future brain of the tall basketball players dodging father divine’s hustlers on the street. You cannot ask for more than immaculation????? (I cdn’t wish no worse on you.) Except we need each other. Red Hook would lecture like Sun-Ra sometimes, when Ra is talking to certain corny niggers about selling out black people. Batgroup would leave for the midwest at night, zooming, and blowing, and come back hooked up, literate, in dey shit, fresh.
Or trailing chicks around, they’d go get the energy to do that. Here. One’s wife was somewhere and somewhere else. One was a pole. Like wood. Wresting a killer humility. A egogod, telling the shadow of what you claim you never had. Or left, the older ones claim to have gained knowledge through error. And how much of that is really true? Guess?? And they’d follow, or one would, Red Hook, or the source. Maybe rubbed on Hook’s coat or African shirt. A dazzle, a stink glow of the source, the possibility of being kings and loved men of a strong people.
They wanted a show. A place. It was good and bad. There too was too much slack for bad wind. They schemed, and darted. Made shit, and you think, didn’t realize it? Think about yrself. You do the same shit. People watch. They watch from across the street through the window with their linoleums drying in late afternoons. They chart your life. They know you walk on glass splinters running shit, like on the radio. Murray the K type shit. “We’ve all seen what you can do, man.” JB talking.
So they’d make both scenes like on a bridge, going to Europe with the Snowmen, then coming back with the key to the invasion of the warm countries by the barbarians, the coldbeasts. And snuggled up with one, a lady, MY God WHAT WOULD THEY TELL THEM BITCHES LOCKED UP IN COPENHAGEN? WITH ICE BLOWING AGAINST THE WINDOWS. AND SOME SHIT HAPPENING IN NEW YORK OR CLEVELAND DIDN’T INVOLVE YOU? YOU DIDN’T KNOW??? WHAT??? and come back to Atomic Bomb shit.
“You shure yo’ shit strong enough, my man??”
Ornette in a hindu Edwardian sack of jewish bass stealers.
But it is in an age of The Miracles. Which must be put to work for us. All our energy. Even the brothers must finally be used for the lot. To raise u. To fly us all into the grace we seek. Which is, without light what they mean then by, Power. Amen.
The night I want to talk about they had gone to this girl’s house I know. (She was sort of an unofficial city limit hostess in them parts. And she had a sickness then, covered people, turn them into different parts of a whole. You want I should characterize that whole? You want I shd patch my wings or retreat to the cellar to brood? It was spread so clean and cool tight got mucho everything-o actually, everybody had some of the shit inem. People stood around. Music was playing. Slick thin insect pee pees were uncovered. Screens full of air. And the aspirations of all the neighbors, in that particular part of the earth, they had rent
to pay, get up next day for hip jobs, meet head on with the white unicorn unfortunately being ignorant and blowing bugles on the top of the baptist churches (UNCONSCIOUSLY, MOTHERFUCKER, ALRIGHT!!!???) to warn Cary Grant’s boys that eastboots were about to slay them.
Is this the scene yr avant-garde shit degravitates?? Inhabitates?? Ya Wohl, marches out the plank splashes into the little rich lady section of universal attention. A vibration in the yellow pages. Pussy for sale!
Aww crisscross shit. Crisscross shiiiiiit, yeh. Reall crisscross shit. People opening and closing doors. Telephones. Creep business being done. Yeh. Singing chicks. Chick wd stand there like some mediocre white lady with one-strap gown and janis paige button and lion eatin her ass, really swingingk.)
The husband was calling for the muslim woman. She was devout and weird to the poorer americans. “ALLAH WAS VERY HIP.” That’s a photomontage of success. “Yesh I was righteous before Bud or Elijah.” Meanwhile, there is a trumpet player fuggingkher. He’s hip. He’s a spiritual beingk. He’s spooky. He knows about ghoses. He’s a strongbean like John Carradine of duh good guise. He’s fuggingkher, riley, really. You goddam catholic pay attention to the meter!
“You mean . . . What . . . naw . . . really no kidding. Really?”
Yeh it’s the tall brother . . . yeh, goes in the room with the broad, then she gets a call from whatsaname, the hostess, that this muslim dude is comin. Like her husbain. Yeh.
Was he playing earlier that evening . . . tall brother? (Nobody here to ask, children playing in the streets. Gentle movement of the earth.) But anyway around that same time he walked water legends with his sound and grew into something he’d never be except in that thrust of his own invisible energy.
Chick hears this and panics. Everybody in the joint did. Hostess. Lil brother. Lil bro’s woman, who’s really pinhead priest’s chick, stopped making it with funkybutt the organiz for a minute, took up with higher math cats. Maybe bealbelly the mystic ex-photographer saxophone player who has speakers inserted in the stones. They blah. They blah. They blah.
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