The Hot Lines: Lover’s Day by TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe

Oh but the longing is terrible
once a heart’s under attack.
I want to love you all the way off.
I want to break your back.

The color of all that’s hysterical
travels along your bones.

Just be near you,
sucking your skin,
not gonna leave you
alone.

Yes dear, of course there are miracles.
A lover that loves, that’s one.
Room with a laughter,
ecstatic disaster
coming to rouse the fun.

We could build an engine
Out of all your raising stars
Tear apart the apart
that seem to think we are

Call of work the next day.
Call it Lover’s Day.
Call it Lover’s Day.

Gimme the keys to your hiding place.
I’m not gonna tear it apart.
I’m gonna keep you
weak in the knees.
Try to unlock your heart.

Your gonna turn me animal.
Your gonna turn me dumb.
Kiss in the night.
Bringin’ the light.
You’re like the raising sun.

I hunger for you like a cannibal.
I’m not gonna let you run.
I’m gonna take you.
I’m gonna shake you.
I’m gonna make you come.

Swear to god it will get so hot it will melt our faces off.
Only we can see, the you, the me in your mirror outside clock.

We’re naked in the light.
We’re jelly
Real tight.

Sooooo soft. Get off. Get off.

Balls so hard they smash the walls
And break the bed
And crash the floor. Don’t stop and laugh and scream and have the neighbors call the cops.
Two lonely eyes have seen the fire blaze.

Can’t forget.
Mark it down.
Call it Lover’s Day.

Yes dear, of course there are miracles
Under your sighs and moans
I’m gonna take you
I’m gonna take you
I’m gonna take you home.

I’m gonna take you home.

I’m gonna take you home.

I’m gonna take you home.

I’m gonna take you home.

4 Hicoo

[after a bath]

I let foriegn oil

Burn wet and cool on my chest

to feel clean again.

[night classes]

Lids drift down eyeballs

laced with leadened lashes dry,

tired and wilting.

[calming down]

The art of waiting:

Everytime you think your bored

Inhale deeply, once.

[giving in]

Like drugs the first drag:

The buzz papercut of cool

Newport on fresh flesh

The Color of Water

Well, the blacks are obviously criminals
And those asians are oh, so polite,
The latins can pass once the accent been slashed
So damnit, let’s all just be white.

Cus world music ’s white music like jazz was
And white hip-hop’s not hip-hop, it’s rock
Good neighborhoods are were the melanin is far
And bad one ‘swhere peoples ain’t bright.

So let Irish be Irish no longer.
Jews don’t care about Torah or Law
Sicilians are tanned and the Nordic’s are bland
And Egyptians are proof and South Africans too
That at base we are one with no culture or tongue
Cus it all just evolved like the science involved
and each land was a rung and each thought at end comes
to perfection, a blankness, all white.

Be the color of water when anything solid seems to disturb the new tide.
It’s the color of ice when dot on a height says no snowflakes more unique then I.

It’s the steam on the mirror
Between you and a face
made of off-yellow indian arab ancestry
million earth light-years made dark matter mass,

and a cell full of dye,

and a thought made of glass

that’s a fragile and crystal as narcissist pond
and the water condensed when your cleansed and embalmed
in a fog made of light
son of Canaan, son of night
son of God who is white
cus he must be.

Make me white just like heaven and Reagan,
White like tofu fried chicken breast milk.

White like gun in your hand
and a brain make of silk
and a last gasp of light like the sun.

__________

The lastest in a series of poems about racial identity that have been banging around my head lately. With all the Reverand Wright stuff swirling around in the past couple weeks (is there anything that guy said that EVERY white liberal friend I know haven’t been saying since ‘01?) I’ve found myself more then a little preoccupied with the idea of deconstructing race. For the record, I don’t black is very useful term either and while I have heard of the book of the same title of this poem, I have never read it. Nothing else to say but that…I’m slowing coming out of a fog this week.

The Hot Lines: Butterfly by Carlos Andres Gomez

Real estate developers are the natural disasters
what defense contractors are to terrorist attacks.
Both like it quiet and well planned.

Maybe find a soft coffin bed for an only son to rest in.
A used trailer for a family of five to struggle to stay alive in.
An entire religion or region for the public to invest their hate in.

Draped in thick rhetoric that tastes like ash and jet fuel on this tongue when I try to speak.

How does a villager in southern Thailand
prove his family has been living on a plot of land for five centuries
when he’s never needed a deed to come home?

When his great grandmother taught him how to weave bamboo
but he has no photographs to prove it.

When Club Med vacations are waiting to be planned
All those post-tsunami package deals on go-puct.com.
Swollen blood on the new foundations of new hotels.

Renovated

multi-level housing. Multi-million dollar brownstones in Brooklyn. Brokers
racking their brains for the next hip catch phrase,

We won’t call it Bedstey anymore.
Let’s call it…“Stivenson Highs”
or “Bedford Village”
or that place where you can take a Biggie Smalls hood-tour.

Not the lower ninth ward
but Andrew Jackson’s Lower Ninth Ward Estates.

Kick the tenants out and build condos.
Put in a police complex across the street like Cabrini-Green, Chicago.

Near the seventeen street canal in lower Mississippi, homeless mass stream down the bayou. The insurance companies don’t even bother with their typical flimsy alibis
now.

Just refusing the answer any phone calls.
Official statement:
Try to find a trailer for now.

We’ll get to you when we get to your paperwork.

They don’t have effective disaster protocol.
But they’ve got intricate stalling procedures and able accountants.
Practice erasing families like pencil markings.

Turn their stories into bond-fires like heaps of burnt books in Berlin.

An illiterate grandmother
in a wheelchair on top of her roof: dead

Left out in the sun
To be rescued by someone.
Her pained expression almost confused for a smile.

Slavery should have prepared them for this, I guess.

Should have known better then to ask for help when all they were brought here for was to be help.

Because land is worth more then we are.
Natural resources and beachfront property worth more then well-earned wrinkles and baby teeth so ocean liners are beached in Madagascar, excess oil and domestic sewage dumped under the last perfect sand and mangrove swamp.

The shaman said the devil put it there.

83 people abruptly buried after a street kid in Rio brought a shiny piece of metal he found in a hospital dumpster back to his village. Low income housing built on land recently cleared of toxic waste. Watts deemed safe for California immigrants.

An infant
staring at her mother’s abnormal growth before bedtime in Chernobyl
wondering what happened
to her arms.

___________

I first met Carlos in the fall of 2001. We were both University of Penn undergrads at the time and were involved in a campus tutoring program. I remmber in that first meeting a feeling of instant familarity, but ultimately I can’t really trust it. Truth is, Carlos is a inspriation to just about everyone the moment you meet. He is one of those people who’s presence fills the room. Without him, this blog would never had existed.

I heard this piece just yesterday on Carlos’ myspace site and was instantly moved. I had a conversation with a young jewish medical student who relocated to New Orleans who, though not really knowing where to stand, was clearly disturbed by the landgrabs and blantent disregard for human dignity that has and continues to occur on areas devistated by Katrina. People’s homes being demololished without their approval, the increible hurtles citzens are put through just to get back on their feet again, the totally lack of any empathy to their position, the anger at even suggesting that they should be helped. This young well-off jewish medical student told me these things, was clearly touched somehow and yet, through it all, made every effort to justify and overlook and block out what was happening all the while. And she was a good person.

The compacity of people to harden their heart so much for reasons they cannot even articulate really startles me. I think Butterfly captures this fustration and it’s bare, ugly source quite well. Preach bra. Preach.

True Bullshit

Baby?

I’m sure you’ll inspire a poem someday.

It’s not that your boring.

From another perspective we could just say I can’t articulate what your inspiration would sound like.

I’m sorry I came in your hair just after you washed it, but I heard that it make a great mosturizer.

I’m stocking up tropical fruit juice so it can taste just like tapioca pudding.

Let’s buy an extra 40.

We need fuel for the late night cartoon maraton and we both know that our attention spans are non-existant.

A fellow child of care-bears and nintindo.

I’ll try not to hog halo sessions all night and turn it low when your deep in a paper.

Kick me out the place often.

We exist in the odd pairs that live joined on the floor and then of to our seperate apartments.

Do you have extra lotion?

Those rug-burned knees look painfully sore and you are one behind in orgasams anyway.

We share a spare newport.

I swear it’s the last box that you’ll ever bum while you pack a fresh bowl for the simpsons.

It’s 3 in the morning:
cake humid air & we dry to a fan ossolating.

Your mother’s so ugly
she stood on the stoop with her face to the sky
and the sun blinked away in a flash.
______

one more for my baby in what has been a fantastic week of valentine’s day. Not that that matters of anything

Night of the Living Hiphop

cus yo…

fa REAL fa real?

’round my corner round corners don’t exist because ultimately everything breaks down to straight lines and right angles; it’s all just blocks, yo.

And if enough black spray hancocks rock the sunny side of the 24^th street bodega then how the fuck do you know they didn’t paint it black in the first place, Yo?

Niggas been time traveling since flash masters mashed needle tips to plastic. Matched cadences, and broke genres. Break bound needles pin floors with thread bare sullies and spin the earth backwards. Dancers trance-like bounce half-dazed; mad-blazed off a stranger’s rolled ganja.

Mcs gasp like they swallowed all scrabble tiles and hide breathes inside the DJ scratches. Steady teasing the slightly eastern baseline, he cuts the highs by 25%, and turns turntable 2 ¾ back. He never finished high school.

In the Overground clear channel rocks romanoff reborn when Jesus Walks. Geniuses spit about clashing liquid swords that make black star flashes. Fascists in Eastern Europe are protested to a beat grown in Brooklyn. Now tell me what is dead?

Words be murdering foes like swing slapped loose cunt in New Orleans.

Before art house quartets with nastiness jazz be just poor mixed asses grinding to drums smuggled in stomachs and split into 8ths. Hollaback nigs wrapped neat sax trills since the 50s. Call Ghostface’s mouth Coltraine’s spit valve ‘cus when the sound of music was sampled the streets where watching. A letter

to those who left lamenting the death of the art of the life outside their window:

Write often. Send postcards. The ghetto misses your bitch ass and your motherland is so fat…

__________

A poem made back in 2006. 2006 was a good year for hiphop. Common smashed with his come-back album “Be”, Clipse and T.I. were burning up the radios with twin killas, Luda show huge growth through his “Release Therapy,” Lupe release his first record to critcal acclaim and the Roots showed they aint’ too good for sampling with the “Game Theory.” That’s not even touching Jay’s return, P. Diddy’s dance record, Ghostface’s solid Fishscale or the boom in instrumental hip-hop albums lead by Madlib and the late great Dilla. And yet, go into any black slam and all you heard was how hip-hop was dead, how rappers were an abomination, and how generally fucked up “those” black men seemed to be. Go to a white slam, by the way, and to this day it will be stuffed with half-ass paradies of hip-hop and black slam artists with after show talk all about how sadly uncreative people who do “those types of poems” and “that type of hip-hop” tend to be, often with those very poets standing in front of them.

This piece was my attempt to speak to the inspiration hip-hop has been to me. Hip-hop has and continues to inform my work through it’s base of unique aesthetics and aits long, diverse history. It has and will always be a part of me and my writing (as well as most of the writers and poets who tend to bad mouth it) and as long as that is true, shit ain’t going nowhere. Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to listen to some Lil’ Wayne. Peace.

The Hot Lines: Let America Be America Again (By Langston Hughes)

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

________

A very modern sentement from the classic American poet Langston Hughes, who’s birthday just past this past Friday., February 1st.

The struggle for what it means to be an American and the combined struggle of American people is becoming a common conversation point lately. In some ways it is depressing that so many years after Mr. Hughes wrote “I, too Sing of America”the question of the personhood and worth of African-American and immegent lives is still called into question. Still we are left with the assumption, on all sides of the debate, that American = white, civilized = white or that intergation into society = becoming white (never minding the illogical jump of Jews, Irishmen, former serfs and even Arabs at times into the club of whiteness)

With hope, by honoring and discussing the issues Mr. Hughes and others who pushed the ideals of the American experiment to it’s logical, justice-for-all conclusions, we will in time have the courage to work towards letting America truly be America once again.

Monday Morning

pace is the thing, I think
to hold tap water in your palm
and lap it up in tender flicks
for fear of future drought.

how love shapes forms that once
needed neither name nor distinction.

a word once made of sound: an object
and truth no longer is enough.

it turns my stomach not to touch her
and yet at last I roll from bed
and take a final sip of coffee
leave her asleep, unkissed, behind.

I’m walking somehow unattached
the blocks away from where I work.

the morning sun within my eye

the weight of clothes I’ve lived
without.
_________

nuf said…

American Skin

in the beginning, there was skin.

permanent tans prescribed to nomads basking after an afternoon hunt and pale cave dwellers hunched in a fire-lit french forest. back when melanin was a raincoat, we regularly saw the slick-red-flesh that boils underneath this shell that we cringe to draw blood through.

in the beginning black was a moonless night, and tribesmen wore skin of walrus while trekking through some 14 shades of white, and race was a contest between barefoot warrior’s once but then there was babel.

and tongue clicks from purple lips sounded like gunpowder mortars.

bright eyed ghost men offered drunk juice and believed the earth could be traded for stones.

in a place where war starts with a dance and meals had half there weight offered to an idea there was first contact with a people of mirrors and coins and serfs.

but once bipeds were a species and aryans were born in iran once.

israelites were arabs long before jesus was a withdrawn rockstar. back when jews praised jah with the blood red corpse of a canaanite, all humanity knew that skin was just the last shield between a sword and intestines and death.

but we don’t see flesh in america.

war is a tv show and blood’s the color of candy apple lollypops and skin is a language. tone is a checkbox. shade ain’t a treelined summertime street in america.

and with that,

our shells have grown thick

our eyes have dulled

and monochromatic american skin has the weight of a middle-aged armor.

much too heavy to dance in. much too ugly to stare at. all looking like mirrors and Fear.

______________

Inspired by a great many thing, both of reality and of meditation. One was a conversation I had in bed with my girlfriend haley. We marveled for a second at the thought of all the organs and flesh just millimeters underneath us and how easy it was to forget that there is anything underneight what we see every day. A day or so afterwords I remember looking my feet in the bathroom on a sleepless night. For some reason my veins were full and fat on my legs and showed green through my skin. It was the first time I notice my shade, that I was not that dark really, not high yellow but certainly on the orangier side of almost brown. It was the first time I can remember identifying my own skin as something other then black.

The Hot Lines: Sermon on the Mount of the Inevitable Progression of Saul to Saul (by Saul Stacey Williams)

Dear Daddy,

Can you see it now?

All the energies swirling from the center, the rings of light, the swarming darkness, the shadows and their sources.

Did you note the seven centers, the transfer of energy, the vibration of sound, your love of the litany.

Did you see how she did that, how I let it seep out, possession.
And jealousy.
And fears.
And doubt.
And fears. Dear Daddy, I do not fear God.

I do not think of him as angry or vindictive or exacting punishment on the prayerful
and prayerless all the same. Do you see now how a mere thought can leave a trail
both light and dark? How awareness must be coupled with action before it overshadows all sentiment and defiles a temple of being?

Do you see now, Daddy, how we are all mystics
(not just Howard Thurman)
working towards the gradual fulfillment of our greatest testament and how many tables and laptops and Cadillacs and pews and pulpits would be overturned in THIS day.

And yet how judgment overshadows the bliss of heightened understanding.

I too see, Daddy, the meaning and need behind the habits you instilled in me.

The prayers before eating and sleeping, the act of giving thanks
and breaking bread ‘n
paying tiads and offering offerings. And through you I’ve learn to think of my profession as professing. God professing through me and I’ve learned to silence the secular so that I to know that I have a calling and Christ Daddy;
it was so important to you that I accepted Christ
as savior and you tried to convert me from the Christ
that you raise me to be.

And you didn’t realized that I never questioned that incarnation of love but questioned
Constantine and King James and the stain glass windows that stained my imagination with images of a God that would not dare live inside of me or Harlem or Brownsville and I questioned where the teachings that the body was a temple were and
that Christ lived within. And that the blood of the lamb was your blood and
mommy’s blood and
my blood and if a doctor told you that your personal diet was tainting the blood the lamb:

would you feed it pig’s feet
and laugh?

I believe in Christ, Daddy.

I read and reread those red letters incased in black binding until I saw it transform
into the red blood incased in your veins and
my veins and
mommy’s. Now there’s a holy trinity.

And the father
is now ghost.

Yes, Daddy. I see you now. Do you see it? Isn’t it beautiful? There is one body. There is one blood and I thank you, Daddy, you taught me that I was a prince and I believed it, ‘for it was you that also taught me to believe.

And I’m going to remember the pride I felt when I stood and walked beside you.
And I’m going to remember your laughter and your fists punching the air to the beat.
And I’m going to remember the one time I saw you cry; it was at your mother’s funeral and how it hurt to sense how alone you felt and how it seemed for a moment that man upstairs became the woman in the coffin.

And I’m going to remember how you lived a daily example of faith and how you never knew were the money would come from, but you how always knew that it would come.

I’m going to remember how you loved to see me imitating you and all the ministers and how that made you laugh and how you,
and they,
inspired me but no church of secular division was big enough to house these dreams,

yes,

dreams Daddy. A subject we never spoke of. Do you see now how they too have there place in reality
and manifestation,
and how water might even help ya remember them. Do you see how it’s all connected?

“Cast your bread,” you would say.

“Cast your bread on the waters and in many days it shall return.” You preached karma, Daddy, and stood dumbfounded at first sight of your Buddhist granddaughter.

I know you see now Daddy, how it’s all connected and heaven is enlightenment and prayer is the constant act of taking action against the mechanical complacency of our nature and sin is not baring witness to the lotus-like unfolding of the highest testament,
love and change.

You died in autumn Daddy

just as the forbidden fruit was falling from the trees. A leaf
that refused to change colors and hold on until winter. I wish you were here.

I wish you had found the will to change your diet and see your every meal as a communion. I wish you had found the will to overcome your grief and allow yourself to be reborn. I wish this were your sermon and not my poem,

and then you would snatch the invisible spirits from the air
and then you would open the doors of the church
and then you would sing in that operatic baritone that made it so easy for everyone to say amen
and I don’t know if I’ll ever listen to Horris Silver again
and I don’t know if I’ll ever stand in this pulpit again
and it may be the last time we all get together
and it may be the last time we all sing together
and it may be the last time. I don’t know
and I know I don’t know
and I may never know, but I would have loved for you to have been here

to teach me.

and I may just call on his name but I would have loved to have call on yours.

which is mine
and ours. There’s power in a name, Daddy.

Saul: a Hebrew name meaning “asked for.”

I never got to tell you how I learned that the apostle Paul never truly changed his name but traveled to far off lands where the letter s did not begin words.

And these words do not begin to express the love I feel and the excitement I feel in knowing you have once again traveled to a land beyond lands
where words themselves do not begin
but rest in the endpoint of their meaning.

Yes you have been struck from a horse once again to be blinded by a light that blinds the sense yet illuminates the path of eternity.
And I know you see it now Daddy.
The distant shapes have become visible.
Hems only hinted at such glory.

And now, my only prayer has been for you to teach me from there what you could not from here. Guide me away from this anger and disappointment into the mirth of your laughter. Show me how love and wisdom are never buried for they rest in the zest of the wind. Guide me to the fireside. Smolder my discomfort with the glowing warmth of the violent flame,

All of these things Daddy,
I ask in your name,

and if it is your will
I ask in the name of the father
which is the name of your son.

_______
I am also the son of a preacher, just as is Saul Stacey Williams, the author of this elergy. And with that, I can attest to the power that comes from a youth constantly preoccupied with questions of faith, sin, humanity and the divine. I can not speak for the life of Saul Williams, but hearing this poem (which you can also hear for yourself at this link) really struck at that clash and rise and peace that comes so often in the lives of those that left the faith of their birth. Like Saul, I believe in Christ now more then ever, though with an imagined, hoped for and seen fulfillment that is beyond the dreams of my youth.

I was also inspired to transcript and post this poem in honor of Martin Luther King, also the son of a man of God, who did so famous believe in the power of dreams. May all of us regain and strength this ability in a world where meaning is said to be useless, love is said to not exist, and God is nothing if not a white man on a cloud staring us down in judgment, jealousy and hate.