A gray-pink-brown earthworm scrunches along the sidewalk 
at 11:05am near the tail bone
of Columbia Road, 
its body easing across segments,
oozing over the rain-water-lubricated surface.

On the corner, an elder twirls a cane and throws it up,
down, sign-tossing,  
flouting purported disability with muscle-memorized agility,
offering his very ability to walk to the gods.

months earlier, a car speeds through a red-light
to make it onto I-93's on-ramp, warp drive to hyper-speed,
nearly takes the shins of a man crossing the street with it,
he turns back and mutters, then screams,
the first day of the new year nearly the last of his life.

months later, boys no older than 13 
are interrogated by state police over petty fireworks,
hemmed up in the train station,
a brief distraction as the commuter rail's bells toll arrival, they
take flight like the sparks they'd allegedly let off a few minutes earlier,
glide across the pedi-bridge,
race the late afternoon light down Columbia Road,
peel off into Uphams Corner, unscathed.

In the present: a child witness watches,
bends to assist the worm,
help hasten its journey.

though its life may soon pass,
the worm quickly contracts from her grasp,
soaking in the light, still-cloying, late-morning-mist.

the road most traveled still has much to offer 
along its path.

This poem is now part of a SoundCloud spoken-word album, released by my friend Rafael Arturo! Listen to my recording here, and to the rest of the album here.

The rest of the series:

walk with me, vol. 1

walk with me, vol. 2

walk with me, vol. 3

walk with me, vol. 4

The homie had been writing for a few years longer than me, and he’d been teaching me little shit (“don’t add all those damn tricks to the tag,” “never write over another writer,” “right in front of the CCTV, you fiend?”) here and there. He’d been caught, narrowly, tagging choice words near his local PD’s precinct office, and wanted to make sure I wasn’t making the same mistakes.

In the alley, he completes a piece he’d started yesterday, commemorating fallen soldiers here and abroad. From Palestine to Prospect Street, martyrs in the struggle abounded; near the tail end of his letters, he threw up our children’s names and their children’s names, side-by-side.

He put his cans down ten minutes later, only acknowledging the outside world once he’d left his letters how he liked them. A firm, congratulatory hug, a nod, and we packed his paints up before jumping back on the red line towards Dorchester.

Cross-country, in the loud and heavy heat of LA in August, ***** explains his vision for a throw-up that politicks; he writes ******, at once a catchy disyllabic that explains its own power. Two years since we’d last truly got to business, four since we’d first started talking about writing, we were finally getting up together. His understanding of what and where to place our transgressions to property belied his circumstantial depth. He was born and raised in LA, where graffiti entered its United Statesian historical context as informal demarcation and claimant of land by territorial militants in the early 20th century; his understanding of how we use public art to police ourselves, as we are policed ourselves, filled in my politics of place and aesthetic like a fat cap shading the inside of a hollow.

I made sure to only pack earth tones for the trip, to not go over anyone or anything, to nod my head out of deference if ever my eyes met another’s.

I stopped by a gallery show in the South End this past winter (neighborhood: invisibilizing, show: suprising!) after my curiosity’d been piqued by advertisements proclaiming there’d be an exhibition celebrating Boston graf legends and street art history via fine art production. I knew a few heads from here or there, but was mostly lost in the mix; I tried to find and question artists and writers to learn what we were convened for and how they approached taking their style from the streets to the page, or to the canvas, or to puppetry.

Many of the works in the show paid homage to graffiti’s early history on the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s old Elevated Orange Line. The first great loss many writers suffered was the demolition of the Elevated Line in 1987, considered by graf historians Caleb Neelon and Roger Gastman to be the first real home in Boston for the production and circulation of graffiti. Writers who lived along the line and contributed to its visuality in the South End and Jamaica Plain were venerated as a class of their own; Peters Park, about five blocks away from the show’s location in the South End, used to be a graf hot spot in large part due to its proximity to the old Dover stop on the El.

Nevertheless, Boston graffiti lives on and reproduces itself—while no longer as predominant in Jamaica Plain, for instance, hubs for writing and piecing have emerged in alleys in Back Bay, under the highway interchange between the South End and South Boston, and in parts of Fields Corner and Allston Village which have not yet been subjected to large-scale redevelopment.

A European writer, more toy than myself, asked me what neighborhoods would be good to get up in, and mentioned wanting to write himself into Roxbury and Dorchester: neighborhoods he could not and should not claim, neighborhoods which should not be bombed and should instead do the bombing. I redirected him towards Allston’s transplanted walls/streets/people, and towards Brookline, as more appropriate stomping grounds—an admonition from graf writer William “Upski” Wimsatt (author of Bomb The Suburbs and No More Prisons) passed through me to fuck up their shit, not ours.

I met an OG after this: a writer from the ‘80s, one of the first in Boston, and asked him what he thought of the event’s location in the South End, in a small arts district called SoWa (read: like SoHo, a developer’s naming convention applied to a formerly working-class neighborhood that has now been renewed out of existence). He remarked that many of the people present for the opening, on a local gallery First Friday event, were people who would have been robbed had they hung out in the neighborhood back when graffiti was predominant and when graffiti writers still called the place home.

Riding the Orange Line this past summer on my way home, to Forest Hills, I looked up at the transit map and saw the entire line southwest of Mass Ave (covering the Roxbury and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods, home to many Black/Caribbean/East African communities), encircled with pen and lazily re-christened, “NIGGERVILLE.”

I thought about tagging over it, in true Boston graf style (its hip-hop-inflected variant emerging, in part, to cover racist spray-tagged epithets left during Boston’s busing days), but decided instead to simply Black it out.

I ran into another writer this summer: a boy saw me getting up on mailboxes downtown, and asked me what I write—I demonstrated, asked him his own byline, and he returned volley, slipped back into the night. I see his name everywhere now.

Walking over the short stretch of locks (as in locks on a channel, canal, or river) that link the West End of Boston, East Cambridge, and Charlestown over the Charles River, I happened across an electrical transformer box that’d been tagged into oblivion—a who’s who of hand-stylers in the city—and got out my own mop to let writers know I was around, too.

I briefly perched on a little safety gate that separated pedestrians from the transformer, to get up real quick, and noticed this old couple walking behind me slow to a stop. Their cutting eyes fixed on the back of my neck as I fiddled in my bag to find my marker.

They let me finish my tag before chastising through flat lips pursed into envelop slits: “you’re defacing private property!”

I replied through a beaming, full, and lightly-yellowed smile: “that’s kind of the point!”

I attended another gallery show in Cambridge, in Central Square, where a foundation was proud to announce their partnership with another foundation and a street arts collective and a graf crew in producing a show dedicated to “mural arts.”

On my stroll to the show, I came across a fundraiser raising awareness and dollars for the Palestinian cause; a few artists had collected their wares to be sold in service of aiding families in Gaza, and in the adjacent alley the fundraiser offered an opportunity to spray messages of support or just to tag up and let folks know who was there in support of peoples arrayed against the axis….I promised myself I’d come back after my prior engagement.

I witnessed…elite capture at the gallery, or something more complicatedly confusing, anyway; street artists I loved from their pieces on public walls made inspiring work to hang on the gallery halls of a private donor who seems to move money towards worthwhile causes, in a room full of putters-on cloistered amongst opportunities. In any case, I said hi to who I knew, feigned interest in the work, and left promptly.

I came back to the fundraiser, an uneasy taste wearing away in my mouth and loosening off my tongue, and asked the purveyors of hope about the artwork they had up for sale; they recommended I pick up a can, instead.

My tags weren’t much; my message of solidarity was clear in language but lacking in flair. Still, a real writer sauntered down after I’d finished and complimented some of my letters (‘e’s as funky backwards threes), validated them, and told me I should keep working at my shit until I could do a throw, a wildstyle, a piece. I asked him what he wrote, and he asked me to follow and watch him work a throw-up from start to finish.

His words were few, our conversation intermittent, dotted with his interjections and notes on style:

see, this is how you connect your lines to flow them (ohhh)—(how did you feign that shine right there?) I learned perspective through practice

before he gave me a fist bump, greeted his old head who welcomed me incomprehensibly (sharing a laugh at a “Nobody Beats the Biz” reference), and passed me his number (***-***-****), told me his name (SMEK), and gifted me his black book.

Legendary Boston graffiti writer and street artist Rob “NOTE” Stull showed work in that exhibition in the South End last winter, his last show before passing this spring. He had a new piece up, “Miss Liberty,” depicting a writer’s life and livelihood being stolen by the eponymous stand-in: a clear visual argument that Lady Liberty’s namesake principle only goes but so far.

Bending lyrics from Yasiin Bey’s “Hip-Hop”, writing will simply, “amaze you, praise you, pay you! Do whatever you say do; but Black it can’t save you.”

Buy a copy of Boston Art Review’s 15th issue here to check out my latest essay on graf, history/memory, and participatory arts in the City of Boston; or, take a look at the article online here.

Elders apologize for inconveniencing me on my way:

My fault king—peace and blessings/

/I’m so sorry, do you have a second? Could you help me carry these groceries upstairs?/

/excuse me: spare any change?

Before they welcome me into their heart, 
allow me to step into their memory,
hold a dap and a hug, hand to hearth.

A mother, an older brother, a grandfather grab my shoulder,
lean into my ear, 
crack me a smile,
my eyes light up.
Cabo Verde, Ghana, and Roxbury greet me with open arms,
Etopya, Chicago, Cleveland grip them back.

I carry bags up to the top of Ghana's five-story brownstone walk-up, 
move my ass to make room for Cabo Verde's old-timer jacket and bottles on public transit,
take a tenner out of my wallet at the bus stop to slide to Roxbury, mistakable for  now-passed patriarchs of my own kin I've only seen photos of;
clear my ears with Wally's Jasm,
reminisce by the one-time home of the Kings,
follow Shabazz's (once Little's) big footsteps.

Listen and give deference to Cabo Verde’s recollection and reflection, congratulate his age, receive his caution;
Adamantly refuse payment from Ghana for simply carrying my weight as her younger in her community 
(a five is forced through fingers into palm anyway, God bless you);
Clap Roxbury on his back and wish him well on his way.

Hail the 1 the rest of my trajectory through recolonized territory
towards the death machine that brought me here.

On the bus, Cabo Verde asks me, do you want to know the secret to happiness? 
I nod.
Guess.

“Discipline?”


He pauses, chuckles; 

"Laughter."

I was able to read this poem last month, as an honorable mention at this year’s Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program!

Groans ruptured the silence of Melly’s sunlit studio. She didn’t wake up on her own timing—in fact she had actually been trying really bravely to stay in her REM cycle—but it was 10:35 am in the unincorporated subdivision of Rosamond, just north of Palmdale, where she was reluctantly paying rent, and since the summer solstice was just three days behind her, only somewhat visible in the dusty rearview mirror of recent memory, it was already 106 degrees Fahrenheit in her section of the Mojave. The high desert had kicked her out of bed.

Last night was really fun, she remembered as a half thought, but chains of alcohol dehydrogenase were putting in work somewhere in or around her liver trying to reshape whatever grain liquor was in that Gold Four Loko she got at Ernie’s Liquor #4 for 5.99 into something her body recognized as nontoxic, and it was really hard to experience anything but discomfort. At least she hadn’t drank alone; she was finally making friends, and she was pretty sure her mom and them would have been proud of her, if they were all still on speaking terms. Alas, not since that carne asada.

Rolling out of bed always reminded Melly of that one time she saw an american alligator at the LA Zoo spin-dismembering a raw chicken–with a ferocity only matched by her cousin Aja attacking a Zankou roast with pita and toum-sticky fingers–splashing her with anthropogenically-swampy water through the chainlinks. She hit her linoleum floor with most of her body and immediately sensed something was off: it was about 25 degrees hotter than the assignment she had given her (admittedly very disobedient) AC unit last night. A quick walk to the bathroom-kitchen proved her right, the GE had finally kicked the bucket and was blowing hot air. “Gross,” turning it off quickly, “I have to talk to my landlord.” She hadn’t seen him since she first moved in, and had hoped to never have to talk to him again, but the list of repairs was getting longer, and the time to demand he do the bare minimum was nigh. One thing at a time though; she forced down a cup of Brita water, distinctly tasted a fluoride-manganese-PFA cocktail that dodged the filter, and started moving on her day.

Her phone’s clock let her know she had plenty of time to get to work (good, because that drive was something vicious), but banners and a popup insisted rather insolently she charge the device. “You’re fine,” Melly dismissed, “I got a charger in the car.”

Her body’s own version of a notification system also complained, hungry. She had only just gotten paid the day before, so the fridge was still empty, save some inappropriate-for-this-early-chelas–there probably was time to shop for groceries and concoct a simple meal, but Melly reckoned she had earned eating out.

Outside was hot enough to threaten an egg’s liquid constitution. Melly’s apartment enjoyed a row of Canary Island palms that looked very spectacular in the Craigslist photos but in reality were no taller than her neighbors’ Great Dane named Heinrich, who was very large for a dog but still waist height. Good for knee shade, but nothing to cover her face from n+1th degree burns on her way to her beloved Dark Grey Pearl Infiniti G37. The keys jingled into and out of the door and into the ignition, but the car made no noise beyond the door beeps and small ignition clicks, even when prompted with a hard couple of turns that normally convinced the engine into a low straight-piped growl. She knew the starter had been suffering, but she had been dogging “el Fin Fin” on the freeway a little too hard on her way home the last couple of times, and who knows what component had gone out. “Fuck, not this. How will I charge my phone on my way to work?”

She stumbled out of the car, back into the stuffy unincorporated subdivision air, which was only slightly less dense and blistering than the air in her currently useless car, a moment of bliss as melanin enhanced vitamin D synthesis in her face, before the rest of her day resolved in front of her. She had exhausted her sick days, work was 65 miles away (a literal 24-hour walk, she guessed correctly) in Silverlake, and she had to clock in in less than 3 and a half hours. She had never traveled to any part of LA on the bus from Rosamond and only took public transit in the high desert one time, to go get engine coolant from the Autozone on 50^th and N when she ran out the year prior.

She was halfway into getting dressed for work and mostly out of her post-sweat-sleep grogginess when she remembered that the California High Speed Rail had just opened its Palmdale station. Huh. She had been hearing about it for what, decades at this point? Billions of dollars in development, Elon Musk picking up or dropping part of the project? Too much News to follow, a fever dream, and in this heat and economy, through the frustration of weaving legs through Dickies legs and forcing buttons into polo collar holes still tight from the dryer, it just didn’t sound right. But she checked her phone maps and there it was, a 3 hour, 17-minute ETA: Kern Transit 100 bus to the Antelope Valley Transit 1 bus to the “CHR,” then from Burbank, the LA County Metro locals 222, to the 2, to finally arriving at OUID, the dispensary she’d been working at since back when she lived in, um, Echo Park. She hated recalling how close she used to live to her job, and how the only thing keeping her tied to LA-just-off-Sunset was the artsy “Eastsiders” who paid $70 for eighths of outdoor sativa, to write mediocre skit scripts and whatever other semi-creative endeavors they required tetrahydrocannabinolic-acid assistance with.

Armed with her best mineral sunscreen and widest-brimmed hat—a straw number from her dad, recently and tastefully modified by a goat locked away in a Hesperia-ranchito petting zoo who had become locally notorious for including unfortunately-nearby headwear in her dietary enrichment plan—Melly made her way to the bus stop for her 2-transfer route to the high-speed rail station. It was a 10-minute walk with no shade, unless she walked within property lines and on the edge of buildings with ominous No-Trespassing signs and Neighborhood Watch posters featuring a suspicious-looking man that she always thought looked like her tío Feo. Yes, of course she had considered Uber, Lyft, and their local new competitor, Drovedly, but the cheapest ride was the latter and it was still a 20-minute wait for 65 dollars (at the same time: Melly’s friend drove for them for two months and never took home a paycheck larger than 300 per week), plus would arrive only 27 minutes faster than the bus. The math didn’t math, and she could always thug it out for the walk, is what she kept telling herself as she finally arrived at the sign and the loose pole that amounted to the 100 bus stop for which she had been unknowingly fated for that day.

She was ushered farelessly onto the bus by a very pretty driver with a nice set of gold adorned twists who beamed at her and warmed her already-overregulated heart. Melly collapsed into her first artificially-cooled seat of the day, took in the smell of the refrigerant, and finally felt ok. She recalled that the last time she rode the bus she had just been glued to her phone the whole ride; this time she was conserving her battery (which she had managed to charge to 34% before leaving home) and decided there would be adequate entertainment outside her window. The desert and its built environs are beautiful in a stark sort of way, but for someone nervous to get to work they feel despairingly endless.

The second bus stop was somehow more barren than the first. It was later in the day and the Sun-Earth-Kern County system was being even more unkind to her than before. The 1 bus almost passed her, she suspected on purpose; a speculation supported by her immediate argument with the driver over the 40 cents she was missing from the $2.40 fare. Eventually Melly won because an even more argumentative rider joined their discussion at the next stop with a single mangled dollar bill that he struggled to insert into the farebox, and she was able to slink into the rumbly back row for the 19 stops before she got to the terminal.

For a city named Palmdale there honestly weren’t that many palms, which she decided were not good shade trees—even when they were meaningfully taller than the ones her landlord settled her with—what with the having to stand far enough from the base to catch the projected sun cover of the crown or squeezing into whatever shadow you got from the trunk and moving radially along with it through the day. Melly heard her grandma’s voice reminding her, “They’re not even native mija. That’s the gringo’s fantasy of Alta California.” Washingtonia-palm-ignorance aside, she wondered what her nana would have thought of the native flora—the manzanita clinging on the side of the concrete aqueduct or the sage dancing in the wind of the passing cars—when she realized she was in the shade of a structure outside the window. She leaned her head as far out as one could against a vertical pane of glass to see a familiar stranger: the same five-over-one geometric blobs of uniformity that started to pop up all over her barrio around the time she was kicked out, first by her family who decided she had smoked her last Dutch on their porch, and then by those same buildings whose business-casual housing agents rejected her because of this or that: not having credit (“don’t get a credit card you will mess up your life”) and no cosigner (“no, I’m not signing that, también, get out of my house, pinche morra”), not making 3x the rent, and just generally failing vibe checks. She tried her hand at a co-op in an abandoned Korean Presbyterian church, rent-controlled roommates three times her age and half her communication ability, and even a squat; but she was tired of dirty dishes left in pews, drama over $30 light bills, and having to (allegedly) tap a mainline for running water. All the good units were taken years ago anyway. She had been banished to the boonies, where at least she could afford her own studio.

As countless blocks of new, desert-named developments swooshed by—Creosote Courts, Agave Apartments, Saguaro Studios—with first floors promising crowds of diverse faceless people and businesses that would never arrive, Melly yearned for home. Not her new home. She missed her home home, a palilogia by which she meant where she was born and spent her childhood and pre-braces years (an extremely socially and dentally painful 5 year period that preceded the precarious financial situation leading to that fateful family-disintegrating carne asada): the bungalow house with the water-swollen door, the caring vecinos who always saved pupusas for her, and the gorgeous trees that annually rained veiny pink-purple flowers named something funny, with two Ls somewhere, that she had, at some point (instructed by a well-edited online cooking video), made into an exceptionally bitter drink and, with decent success, had finally rendered edible with copious muddled strawberries and sandía.

She was missing it extra bad today.

The coach pulled into the layover, slinking under and into the umbra of the very large and out-of-place transit station suspended over the street. It looked like what a architecture firm website might laud as “state-of-the-art,” Salesforce-Plaza-like—the monstrous Dyson appliance that replaced the Transbay Terminal in Embarcadero, SF—that Melly reminisced about from the one time she went to the Bay Area on a whim with her ex from Oakland. She didn’t miss him or their hyphy breakup at all, but she distressingly found herself missing Bay Area transit prices, when she approached the terminal and saw: “One Rider One Way, Peak Hours, $27.50.” Melly produced the same flummoxed expression her 10th-grade Algebra 2 teacher got during the quadratic formula lecture, which freshly annoyed the ticket lady behind the 3” plexiglass window; but Melly had to get to work and it was just this once, hopefully, so with her ticket in hand she made her way toward the platform.

She stood in the very long and dull interior, with alien, ovular lighting fixtures overhead and painted art on the walls that Melly imagined had to have been commissioned online, or maybe purchased at a Goodwill and vectorized for resizing. She barely had time to squint down the length of the tracks to look for silhouettes of other train-waiters before It glided into the terminal, far faster than she would have liked. The sleek glass door of the giant snake hissed slightly, opened quickly, and closed just as impatiently, almost hitting Melly from behind as she entered the empty car. The train slithered forward before she was able to sink into the spacious brown leather seats. Before she could whistle at her chair’s luxury, an immaculately made-up conductor in an eggshell suit with red epaulets and a silly feathered hat came by and checked her ticket. “Oh I’m sorry, you’ve purchased an economy ticket and this, you see, is the first class section,” he expressed with more pomposity than the zip code called for. Melly’s face remembered Algebra 2 for the second time in 15 years and he responded with a frown that appeared preloaded into wrinkles she hadn’t noticed before. “I’m going to ask you to please move to a more appropriate carriage.” She looked out the window hoping some landmark or road sign would back up her claim to the seat but they all flew by indistinguishably. He ushered her impatiently for three cars until she found her seat in the economy section (which she later found out was the only publicly available ticket—first- and diamond-class cars were reserved for donors of the CHR that contributed approximately 10 and 100 times her annual income, respectively). The car seemed much more squalid than it should have for a supposedly new train. The floor was already decorated with footprints from dirt, divorced from shoe bottoms and eloped with the tacky surface whose spilled source Melly didn’t want to think about too hard. Stick, unstick, stick—she added her own prints before reclining into what she knew to be a wet cloth seat. Her knees grazed the seat in front of her, and she noticed a slightly taller man than her with his knees miserably to his chest across the aisle. She spent no more than 15 minutes on the damp couch before the profile of downtown LA flew into view. She would have missed her stop had it not been the end of the line.

Union Station was just as stately and art deco as she remembered, except for the part where the California High Speed Rail retarded to a halt. It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t spectacular—it was—but that the glass semi-sphere adjoining and stylistically boxing with the old station opened up to a vista filled entirely too much by the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Melly wondered if her cousin was still in there—she last heard he was doing a 2-year bid downtown for liberating a federal armory’s worth of water guns from the South Gate WalMart for the fourteenth annual Wet-n-Wild donuts-in-the-intersection style takeover. She would have welded her G-37 rear differential for his first day out in different circumstances. Damn. “Free him or whatever,” she muttered on her way down the elevator, which had already picked up an off smell she couldn’t describe, and moved with the same smoothness of the train, leaving its passengers a bit sick from the G forces.

She hit the tile ground floor of the station running. The transfer from the train to the bus was tight and she could already see a write-up being outlined in the highly kiefy OUID back office for her mild tardiness. She burst out onto the parking lot and into the Los Angeles heat dome, sprinting down the sidewalk toward Alameda St. and running around 5 tents with creatively affixed blue, black, and camo tarps, jerry-rigged swamp coolers, and upside-down bicycles in various stages of fixed or disrepair, then turning more sharply than her knees could handle toward Cesar Chavez Blvd. Her already dirty Sambas collected more adhesive, this time a green, probably-spearmint gum on the corner of Spring St that someone had just spit out. A 3-second moment of panic looking down and trying to scrape it off made the difference—she arrived at Cesar Chavez and Broadway to see the bus pulling off without her, struggling up the hill burning clean natural gas into the underside of the Hill St. Bridge. She contemplated walking (1 hour 22 minutes) and Drovedly again (she forgot it only served the Antelope Valley and surrounding blast radius, and Uber beat out Lyft as cheapest alternative at $34), but instead slumped onto the dirt embankment and pulled down her company-issued dad hat over her eyes in defeat. 18 minutes later, 2 minutes ahead of MTA’s schedule but 5 minutes behind Melly’s, and 2 dusty pant pockets later, came another 4 bus to whisk her away down Sunset Blvd. The driver could sense her energy and avoided a fight with her by accepting a penny as valid payment. The bus was full so she found a 3 square-foot patch of space between two grandmas with identical folding carts and Food for Less bags of peanut butter and celery among other less exciting things. They were gossiping fervently about a third, unseen nana’s granddaughter and her boyfriend, something about a secret child and a pregnancy hidden in a quinceañera dress. She only understood a third of the Spanish they spoke, and another third she didn’t catch from checking her phone for the time. She spammed the door button on the wrong stop, apologized profusely, and vaulted off dangerously on her correct stop, almost twisting an ankle on the way down but managing to hold on to an expired parking meter for support. She burst through the front door of OUID, hoping for a miracle of managerial negligence, but her shift lead was there to greet her. He waited for the customer-announcement doorbell to stop ringing before,

“You’re late Melly.”

“I know, boss. I know.”

GG Flores () was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Mexico within the rotten aura of dodger stadium (90012 por vida) and is currently a bus driver. they enjoy word salad, 29” bmxes, pick-up basketball, and watching the US empire retreat its tentacular grip on the world. they are mad that Elon Musk owns half the sky, and is tired of living in a “democracy” with “free market” housing but when you can do nothing and there’s nothing you can do, you do what you can.

June Jordan, famed Black poet and essayist—whose work has been cited most recently in response to the ongoing and quickening genocide in Palestine—took advantage of such an opportunity 60 years ago to instead look forward, and to plan a new world; her rejoinder to Esquire’s request for her coverage following the 1964 Harlem rebellions against racist police brutality entailed instead a visionary new plan for Harlem’s built environment. Jordan took on the neighborhood’s design head-on as a means toward encouraging built environment development, social well-being, and healthier communities—she was interested not in one death, however meaningful, nor in the action which followed, and focused her brilliance on attempting to redress Harlem’s material conditions, the physical circumstances which allowed/encouraged the act of police murder and which enabled the perpetual, slow genocide of Black folk.

Jordan’s ruminative poetry, often concerned with environmental design, informed this masterplan redesign of Harlem published in Esquire (under her married name, June Meyer), which would have instantiated fifteen “curvilinear” rounded towers that call to mind nuclear facilities—the plan is a high-modern imposition (read: of a design movement most prevalent in the early-to-mid-20th century that emphasized top-down planning of both the built environment and its use cases) that sought to build a new skyline for Manhattan’s northeastern-most neighborhood; it was thus aptly titled, Skyrise for Harlem (although Esquire published the plans under the title, “Instant Slum Clearance”; check out the whole pdf of the article here (and note that it might take a second to load)). In the midst of a half-decade of praise and re-evaluation of these plans, which have been lifted up from the archives as an exemplar of Black imaginative urban design, it feels fruitful to assess, or re-assess, their merits—and failings.

Designed in partnership with Buckminster Fuller, Jordan’s utopic, technofuturist vision is inspired; drawing from Le Corbusier’s basic principle of density and from Fuller’s own prior work in fantastical urban design solutions, Skyrise’s planned towers were to be sites for creative cultural engagement and protection, while further flights of fancy (like water barriers over the whole of Harlem) attempt to harness the natural environment to accommodate urban systems in a sort of cyborg city arrangement. New, beaming, broad roadways would foment connection between Skyrise towers and the city at large, and would even comprise the main means of travelling between towers.

Jordan made use of the essay, and Fuller the illustrative drawing (produced by one his assistants, Shoji Sadao), as a form to bring to life the urban imaginary; the actual production/realization of the plan would have come via “assembly-line manufacturing of all its parts…undertaken by an industry willing to convert, for example, from the furnishings of war to the furnishings of peace” (Jordan). This specific note of technofuturism characterized by assembly-line production is tinged more by Fuller than by Jordan; Fuller’s approach to design work relies heavily on Henry Ford’s mechanized labor/capital innovation, making use of heightened production speed and precision to realize large-scale plans. It is clear here that Skyrise’s fabrication plans were influenced as well by the post-war boom in manufacturing, fueled by a war industry that easily retooled itself towards mass consumer/commercial production and economic progress among the waged and employable. Skyrise for Harlem adopts a progressive stance regarding the enhancement of humanity through (urban) technologies; Jordan indicates a sort of intelligent-design-by-way-of-humankind, concluding her plans in prophesying that “if man is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must be consciously and deliberately designed.”

Jordan and Fuller presented a proposal that attempted to renew Harlem without removing its residents: Skyrise would have been constructed over top of the existing built environment so no residents would need to move or be temporarily/permanently displaced; once development is completed, residents can choose to move up into the conical edifices. Jordan and Fuller propose that “the lower depths will [then] be cleared for roadways and park space. The design will obliterate a valley of shadows: Skyrise for Harlem means literal elevation of Harlem to the level of Morningside Heights;” how this would have occurred was left unclear, and as yet no urban renewal project has succeeded in ensuring zero displacement—to build something in place of what exists, what exists necessarily must move (or cease to be), and it’s not clear how Harlem residents would have continued daily life while their entire neighborhood sat underneath the construction of its replacement.

The plan clearly saw Harlem’s ghetto-like conditions and deep inequities at the time of writing as keys to its detriment; Jordan explained that “Following the Harlem riots of 1964 a profusion of remedies for what was at last accepted as a critical situation appeared everywhere; nowhere, however, was environmental redesign given prime emphasis. Yet it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern and quality of living experience.” She continued that, “[p]artial renovation is not enough. Piecemeal healing provides temporary relief at best and may create as many problems as it cures. A half century of despair requires exorcism.”

Jordan and Fuller planned to construct a new neighborhood that is responsive to Harlem’s conditions, but their conceptualization failed to be responsive to Harlem’s community members, who were not consulted in the planning process and who have no real voice in these designs. Advocacy planners, planners who supported community-led planning (and counter-planning) initiatives, were actually present in Harlem at the time, and would come to the fore just three years after the Skyrise in Harlem plans were published. ARCH (Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem), a firm based in Harlem and led at first by white architect C. Richard Hatch, later by Black architect J. Max Bond, worked with grassroots organizers to assert claims on how city spaces were being produced or reproduced via redesign (collecting input from community members and providing technical assistance with the designs themselves)—while this approach did not produce many, if any, new material realities, it did emphasize community control, and even a form of “Black power urbanism” according to urban historian Daniel Matlin—and this work helped reorient some of New York’s plans for Harlem’s redevelopment towards a self-determinative approach. Further, ARCH’s proposals were grounded in what existed in the neighborhood, and in a Black—at times, Afrocentric—sense of place and neighborhood, arguing specifically against fanciful, new, high-modern designs, but instead for the preservation of the street and of historical brownstones and other architecture which came to typify Black Harlemites’ housing stock. The problem, for ARCH and for the communities they worked with, was not that Harlem was designed poorly—it was that Harlem was not able to exert itself in its own destiny.

While much less design-oriented, movements and organizations would follow later in the decade that shared such a creative attitude as applied to Black polities and communities, solving not just for the immediate problem of police violence but for improving the overall conditions: the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, both born out of self-protective urges against white/police violence, greatly expanded their remits into housing advocacy and healthcare (with the Lords going so far as to occupy churches and hospitals, taking command of extant space to repurpose it for community needs and fomenting the basis of “insurgent” planning, or planning efforts made by the people against the state). However, these examples constitute bottom-up, organizing-based plans for justice (and do not overtly or principally concern themselves with physical design), where Jordan’s topdown vision instead constructs from within the confines of intellect and is preoccupied with design as the solution. Notably, in comparison to the Lords and Panthers who were acutely aware of and responsive to safety concerns, Jordan and Fuller’s plans also fail entirely to address policing, the heart of the issue at hand—while architecture can indeed refer to the creation of environment, the enforcement/governance of said environment plays just as crucial a role in outcomes and lived experience, and Jordan and Fuller elide this entirely in favor of reshaped facades and water collection methods.

Further, economic development—often a key concern of planners, and certainly a concern for Black communities suffering from over-policing and incarceration as they simultaneously faced mass un/underemployment, which made them more vulnerable to the police state, to eviction, and to wealth deprivation—is not accounted for whatsoever in Jordan and Fuller’s plans. Neither the Black ascensionist mode embraced by Henry Lyman Morehouse, W.E.B. Du Bois’ NAACP, or the Urban League, supporting Black leadership and integration into white economic structures; nor the Black self-determinative mode put forward by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, Malcom X and the Nation of Islam, or The Republic of New Afrika, holding for Black cooperatives and small businesses supported by local Black communities, are incorporated into Skyrise—not even a simple jobs guarantee for Harlem residents in the construction of the new Harlem.

Jordan and Fuller, in their modernist zeal and in the context of highway planning emerging as the primary method of organizing transit in the midcentury United States, included highways as direct mechanisms to facilitate transit between and outside of the planned towers, at the expense of all other modes of transportation (including train usage, biking, and pedestrian activity, all of which were and are more dominant modes of movement for Black and working class residents of New York City)—this, again, fails to be responsive to actual conditions. The Cross Bronx Expressway rift asunder communities of color in the nearby Bronx just a decade before the Skyrise planning began, and introduced high levels of noise and environmental pollutants; Jordan and Fuller would have opened Harlem up to such nuisances and health dangers had their plan been implemented, and may have instantiated community loss within the neighborhood of Harlem. 

Skyrise for Harlem’s central failing is this: design alone cannot address, or even outline, problems better circumscribed by addressing capitalism and racialization on their faces through organized struggle. Redesigning highway infrastructure does not resolve that highways themselves were and are harmful to pre-existing communities. Installing rain shields over a whole neighborhood introduces a host of new ecological problems in the service of attempting to reduce an anthropocentric hydrological problem. New housing towers with new recreational spaces do not address cities disemploying Black youth and subjecting “surplus labor” to underground labor markets in hustling, wheeling, and dealing in current recreational spaces. You cannot hide Black people from the police behind new facades.

Notably, Jordan and Fuller’s designs were not connected to a discrete set of politics at all, where many of their aforementioned counterparts and contemporaries were at the least commmunalist, if not anti-capitalist/anti-racist—perhaps this was intentional, to not erect a roadblock against implementation. Another notable writer from the same time period, Amiri Baraka (well-known for his foundational participation in the Black Arts Movement, and a luminary who at one point called for “a Black Nation. In Harlem, where 600,000 [sic] Black People reside”), would plan a housing development deep across the Hudson River in his home city of Newark, New Jersey, just 5 years later; called the Kawaida Towers, Baraka hoped to lead the charge of building new housing alongside Black cultural nationalists (and in fact, was working with a spiritual/philosophical movement for whom the towers were named) but was stymied at every turn by white pols who called him a racist and felt this development was a play for spatio-political power.

However: vis a vis implementation, herein lies the rub: Skyrise for Harlem also never got off the ground. The well-laid-out plan put forth by the pair fell folly to individual ambition, stalled by Buckminster Fuller’s backlog of other projects; this is just as well, for it is unclear what good would have come of this plan. Just urban futures must take their environment, and their politics, into serious consideration; if the planning for such futures doesn’t come from whole communities themselves, community members must retain power and privilege in the design and implementation for renewal to truly remain in their interests. Design cannot be first and foremost among our concerns, at least not in the traditional sense of physical design: overhauling policing, reorienting transit systems, and addressing underemployment and alienation must come first.

These qualms I raise were likely not new or unfamiliar to June Jordan; she was a true political and artistic forebear, demonstrating for myself and many others to how to operate as an artist in the midst of revolution. She also has passed more than twenty years prior to this essay being published, and has lived a life full of action and commitment to liberation; so this criticism serves not as a rejoinder to her design practice, but moreso as a warning of what can be possible when we plan without coordinating with those who are being planned for—what is possible when we plan for, instead of planning with. While Black imagination is critical, it is ultimately collective Black imagination which must be platformed and supported, above and beyond any individual (no matter how committed to our causes they may be). Our imagination must serve our needs, and draw as its inspiration a commitment to a shared sense of place.

I’ll get you

80% of the way there; crude efficiency is the maxim

optimization be the life force

justice falls to detriment.

why can’t you just accept me, baby?

don’t I do enough?

I care for you, a lil' bit;

I’ll fulfill my obligations,

almost.


let your guard down and I’ll surprise you halfway,

flowers the day after your birthday,

a bike lane down your block, the bikes will come someday.


cut those tears of dissatisfaction, you know I get the job done.

slide you these food stamps and keep you fed 
(but don't get no hot food),

grab you up in a warm embrace instead,

I promise I'm not tryna fuck with your head.


I give you a love you can just quite, maybe, not all the way feel.

'bare minimum bastard'? don’t you like my smile in your face when I tell you to be thankful for this meal?

my heart is in it, but my mind is elsewhere still, 


I'm figuring out these money schemes and trying to hold a balanced budget together before I default,

I can’t cover the kids’ school this year my love, it ain't my fault they’ll have to 

read old books and eat processed foods and maybe they’ll falter in literacy, but they won’t get left behind!

you won’t get left behind, I promise, I’ll never leave, 

I’ll do just enough.  


I’ll get you next time,

I’ll get you in four years,

can you just do this for me though? Can you

help me move apartments? Can you float me some cash,

Can you pay this war tax, 

look the other way while I support abuse and genocide,

fund this land grab

Vote for me, please! Stay with me for the long haul, 

lay with me in the pig sty,

you’ll only get a little dirty, right, 

is your conscience really that much of a price to pay? How about your dignity?
your life?

I'm not asking for much; 
so please don't ask me for shit.

Just remember, I'll get you back
one day.
I'll get you back next time.

‘What happened to that boy?’ (or, ‘we (I)/our(my)’)

To the extent

that I’m interesting in writing re: gender in this moment, I’m most moved by the subtle and immensely hurtful ways that we (I) slip into masculinized performances that are disregarding, disrespectful, ice-slick, stone-faced, closed. As we (I) grew out of and into certain aspects of manness, we (I) recall our (my) mom’s sad, maybe manipulative yet ultimately truthful lamentation that the sweet, expressive child she once knew no longer faced her as an adolescent—what happened to that boy? This sweetness having been stolen out of that boy, wrested from him alongside other feminine traits heavily policed in men, taken advantage of in people-pleasing that a certain kind of interlocutor might exact in their domineering relations, it was nevertheless sublimated into/under a colder face, a sardonic and overcorrective asshole emerging who could perform for authority but who could no longer respect it, a burgeoning delinquent who made use of the slippage allowed by his boyish demeanor and high prospects to get away with salacious language and light bullying. Yet and still, the lamentation ('what happened to that boy?') is devastating; and has been offered in one version or another to countless cold faces and glazed eyes, offered to boys accustomed to abuse (receiving, or giving, or both) and unadulterated by remorse until years of reflection later. We (I) remember being this near-saccharine, corny, genuine, incredulously expressive person in so many years and hours, and at the same time wishing that we (I) could or would feel less, be less, until the genie of manhood granted our (my) wish at the expense of stunted dependence and shallow relationships—what happened to that boy?

The peaks and valleys of a wild and unmaintained emotionality have smoothed into rolling hills; more manageable, maybe more mature, likely more malleable, largely less human, a reaction to entirely regular setbacks and rejections becoming a stance of detachment that borders on disembodied. 

How many times can we (I) offer an apology for the same behavior, before it’s who we (I) are (am)? How many times can we (I) lie to our(my)self, before the lie sticks and the truth slides off the fold and into the subconscious? 

A man stands before you, apologetically unapologetic, aware of his faults and unable to right the wrongs due to sheer ignorance, possibly incapable of romantic love and surprised at his own still-present but likely dwindling capacity for feeling anything: what happened to that boy?

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Fingers a-flurry and brow furrowed, condensation on temples threatening

to break concentration as sweat droplets bead into the corner of an eye,

the bass player obliviously strums with lids closed and locs shaken,

the drummer ain’t been given some, but he’s taking some

careful concision in his interlocution, he beats kick lightly and holds tetanus in his arms and calves to lock in rhythm

labyrinthine lights hang overhead, a panopticon of a skylight above offering heavenly viewership of trapped bodies

pace picks at limbs as the frenzy hurries and syncopation finds familiar tunes before breaking out in hives/jives

a small moth, maybe a butterfly, flits about the lights and floats in the breeze as notes push and pull

hulked back and shoulders tense and widen

audience trances,

the butterfly embeds itself in the skin of backs and shoulders, across the belly of the listener,

melody improvises a safe haven,

the butterfly breaks free,

a messenger to the stars.

Another body rises in resistance.

For further context, please read my dear friend Niara Hightower’s review of the performance piece that inspired this poem!

Photo by Melissa Blackall

P.s. my first year as a grad student is finally finished! So look forward to more updates from me on this site/newsletter this summer; thank you for bearing with me 🫶🏾

Students trample over history.

Locals way-find off abused paths along less-driven lanes—a child, for instance, cuts hard to avoid Mass Ave, favoring a skip down Main.

Memorial Drive swings you East, eliding institutes to introduce shopping malls, open plazas, and small pocket parks filled with green;

skaters fill Lynch, and Eggs Park on the other side of the scene,

grown men cracking their vertebrae for clips like fiends while BMX bikers emerge from ramps and bowls with legs a-splay

Kendall comprises coldness—a clinical coordination of commuters across crosswalks while pedestrians with cross faces cut consterned glances at folks of concentrated color;

alienation and hypervisibility abound as cameras capture our countenances and surveil us as prey

Private green lands abound in the evil empire, manicured hedges manufactured by horticulturists at odd hours as ground falls fallow to dollars and

Industry begets industry as our institutional landlords implement price hikes and imbricate parcels for biotech and software sprawl

So let’s cut northwest and enter the Port at a jog, shoes plodding and stomping like a swung kick drum on a D’Angelo song

Youthfulness mucks about the interior streets as the afternoon hours approach, bikes busying about as playgrounds fill with brilliance

Aspiring artists, architects, gear heads, engineers, lucid dreamers, and future putrid pols fill the pews in a strip of tea bars and cafés,

Devout career-builders find free moments to connect over frustration before they hop and trudge to the bus stop,

gripping bars and handles to prevent momentum sway.

A seminary up near Broadway brings brothers and sisters into sacred space to honor the words of prophets and angels, before Allah they genuflect to pray,

heads and shoulders turned southeast towards Mecca, our feet follow their worship as we make our way

Prospect runs into Western Ave and River Street, a subdivide to cleave Cambridgeport from Riverside, where Sly cuts heads and Cambridge houses its public

Community centers commit their commoners to courses, feed families, educate the earnest, provide pre-adolescents property to play

The kids fulfill spectra and quota as they grow to adulthood, as their city grows in love and geography while under watchful gaze

Uniformed operatives circle Central Square to keep loiterers, Black and brown youth, and the unhoused on edge in mental disarray

Mere yards astray from City Hall and the Post Office, blocks from the public library, a brisk stroll south of CRLS; the state’s positive and negative apparatuses on full display

We press past and push feet against pavement and pick up the pace

Folks got cans to shake, stickers to paste, chants to echo on solo missions towards the end of genocide while weapons manufacturers sit blocks away

This might be where our walk concludes (I gotta make some personal pit stops and politick with some homies so we can stay in tune); but forthcoming soon, potentially a part two to address the spindles of empire in Harvard and the towering facades of Alewife with a tad bit of delay.

from nearly 3 and a half years ago, in my traipsing days

trance trounces thoughts, my folds’ static close

drums drain into synths as lights shatter and splatter disco

camera shutters eclipse and capture content

movement frees scapular stiffness, in the night necks roll

coquettes tempt cats, heads snap and catch sly eyes

that linger a little in the moonlight

will you loiter with me in God’s mind?

Can we dance ‘till liberators’ freshly free flesh blinds us in glorious might, as God’s kind?

Stand with me in the rain

Tear drops the shape and size of bullets cascade

The floodgates of the aorta open love and life before both fade

this club’s walls can’t handle another 808-pounding heartache

Foreclose the property, forgo the love—or stay the course

Niggas is too young to fear pain and too old to play the wallflower

Ain’t shit safe but the nursing of wounds—

only through knowledge and freedom can we attain all power.

I got to read this poem as an honorable mention awardee as part of the Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program this year! Check out my reading below :)

I’d been meaning to see Earl Sweatshirt (gov’t name: Thebe Kgositsile) live since time immemorial. His simultaneous positioning as irreverent in his day-to-day while sincere in his diary-like recordings made me curious to see how his Jekyll-Hyde states would surface in a performance context, and his sound-sop production turn over the past five years has borne works that sink into contexts without which we cannot exist. A heaviness in his heart is balanced by nimbleness in thought and speech; bearing witness is burdensome without wit that meets the matter.

Earl’s presence in Boston in a biiiig leather Pelle Pelle jacket, at the Royale on November 24th (alongside frequent collaborators The Alchemist, MIKE, and Black Noi$e) showed us just how difficult a life of the mind can be when pressed to perform for audiences. He warmed up to us eventually, pleased by our recollection of his every bar and our earnest love for his humor and his depth; from Doris classics like “Molasses” to his new record Voir Dire from top to bottom, Boston held Earl up, and Earl delivered. Thebe is every bit the poet his father (Keorapetse) was on this earth; a post-structuralist posture was apparent in his pace, and his patience with us as an audience allowed true connection over the abstruse yet effective lyrics he’s known for (e.g. “Streets ablaze with the anger complacency and deceit create”).

Jokes broke through in brief moments: mid-show, Earl called out in celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this year, imploring us to do fifty push-ups if we love hip-hop (and scolding us when no one got down on the ground).

Seeing Thebe in the flesh reminded me of a brother of mine from LA; both are blessed and cursed with eyes too wide and minds too open to ignore the wholeness of what sits before them, cross-examining testifiers and criticizing juries that decide fates as the world’s sentence lays in the balance. When my brother lived in Boston, he weighed delight and delinquency with learning to struggle in this foreign context; Earl appeared to do the same. The music video for track 2 on Voir Dire, “Vin Skully”, gets to the heart of the matter: in every frame, Earl strolls a treadmill in a new setting, a reference to the old parable proffering, “wherever you go, there you are''.

Originally published below!

The institutions entangled in such efforts chase the money just the same, and approach management of space in similar regards; chief among them is Massachusetts’s very own MIT (world-renowned technical institution, locally-renowned gentrifier of Kendall Square, Cambridgeport, and East Cambridge). MIT is deeply implicated in the Zionist project, holding study-abroad programs and various other legitimizing partnerships, alongside co-created financial infrastructure (like the MIT-Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund, the MIT-Israel Broshy Medical and Healthcare Fund, and the MIT-Israel Lockheed Martin Seed Fund), and various imperial tech development apertures (like MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, co-run with the United States Air Force to develop ‘national security’ technologies, and MITRE, a spin-off not-for-profit organization which maintains ties and partnerships to MIT and which runs federally funded R&D centers that focus on defense, aerospace, and telecom interests). These connections help explain MIT’s heightened opposition against pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist organizing on campus, a stance made extremely clear over the past five days.

And the last five days have been a-fucking-lot to process. Campus organizers have had to reckon with MIT’s administrational intimidations and its campus cops who seek to unfairly enforce rules and regulations upon their fiefdoms. A recent sit-in/shutdown action held on Thursday, November 9th, fell into disarray when peaceful protestors organized by MIT’s Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) were continuously harassed and violated by counterprotestors (who were unafraid to enlist MIT PD as their own personal security, shoving folks and yelling obscenities in faces before quickly calling for police to protect them). CAA-organized protestors, in exchange for their entirely peaceful responses to these aggressions, were then threatened with academic and financial retribution from MIT’s highest administrators if the original protest continued indoors. Nevertheless, folks persevered; the shutdown lasted a full 12 hours, and CAA’s shrewd operations and strategic communications brought media and legal attention which forced MIT’s administrators to walk back their threats. Many of us attended this action in on-and-off shifts; MIT PD eventually locked off the first floor of the main protest area, known as Lobby 7, to prevent personnel and remunerative relief, but this didn’t stop us from continuing to congregate and finding clever ways to offer food and water to protestors on the floor.

A question from a friend towards the end of the shutdown, as several of us gathered above the protest space to be present in solidarity (and to keep a watchful eye over the policed, enclosed lobby), became a helpful searchlight toward understanding MIT’s responses. Paraphrasing from memory, the question: “MIT is known as a space for countercultural student initiatives! People put on pranks (called hacks here) where cows and police cars end up on the dome of our main campus buildings; why aren’t these sort of actions still happening?” The answer is complicated, but familiar: MIT (as an institution) has embarked upon a campaign over the past decade to renovate, remove and/or quite literally gentrify the spaces and housing residences that fostered the counterculture MIT is known for (and markets itself upon!). Starting with Bexley Hall in 2013, then Senior House in 2017, and potentially continuing with East Campus (undergoing renovations starting this year), MIT has made a conscious and sustained effort to displace students from ‘disruptive’ housing arrangements, dorms which prided themselves on their openness to fluidity in gender presentation and sexual expression, their proclivities for stunts and hacks, their statuses as loci for leisure, and their oppositional relations to administration. MIT’s actions were a result of pressure from donors; these alternative spaces were a safe space for vulnerable populations who could coalesce and find community amidst a difficult and heavy academic experience, but these spaces also presented an uncomfortable image to conservative alumni + outside funders and they confounded expectations with lower comparative graduation rates relative to other housing arrangements. This discomfort pressed MIT admin to use the excuse of graduation rates to disband Senior House; Bexley Hall was allowed to fall into disrepair by the administration for decades (as a sort of benign neglect in practice), allowing MIT to then claim that the building was structurally unsound and needed to be demolished. No replacement housing was built to hold the campus communities which had organized themselves in Bexley or in Senior House; students and culture were displaced to appease monetary interests and protect funding, and new dorm developments arising five years later became sterilized opportunities for integration. Moreover: prior to MIT’s interventions, these buildings were all low-rent; coming renovations to East Campus will mean rising rents, and Senior House’s rebranding as a culture-less graduate dorm has also allowed MIT to exact higher dollar amounts from its students as a landlord. All of this means that we no longer have true, established homes for subversive action on campus, and this is the direct result of MIT’s intentional efforts to protect its cashflows.

These pressures from donors and funders, and the attendant image-conscious reactivity, provide context for MIT’s actions in the present: rumors spread on the day of the shutdown that Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT (and president of the MIT Corporation, which governs MIT’s endowment and land holdings), was directly pressed by donors to act hastily in threatening suspensions on protestors. I overheard concerned Zionist counter-protestors on the phone to others outside of Lobby 7, disappointed that communications to Kornbluth, to donors, and to MIT PD had not resulted in the clearing of protestors from the lobby—and yet, while they were unsuccessful in forcing students to leave that day, a teach-in which was scheduled to take place the following morning and afternoon had to be canceled as MIT locked off classrooms and placed police in front of doorways to prevent CAA from congregating on campus. This is not the first time that MIT has used aggressive policing tactics to remove people from space; the original Coalition Against Apartheid (first organized to campaign against South Africa’s hypersegregated state) erected a replica of a colonial shantytown edifice on the lawn in front of our student center in 1987, taking up space to demonstrate the need for divestment from a nation where such sights were commonplace—and MIT responded by tearing it down, calling the police, and arresting CAA members.

All of this leaves us with many questions to answer for ourselves: how do we approach movement-building, given that institutions are letting us know exactly how they plan to interact with us in physical space? What is ‘safety’ when universities threaten protestors peacefully organizing in common spaces with suspensions, when administrators make mention of campus police enforcing space restrictions with arrests? When police get in ears and faces and tell marshalls that they can’t protect protestors from being filmed for doxxing purposes by self-deputized Zionists? When MIT Admin attempts to order CAA to take its shut-down outdoors, in the midst of near-freezing rain and 40-degree temperatures, restricting speech, space, and access in one fell swoop?

Speaking on these enclosures of space is important at this stage; we as students should not at all be the center of conversations, but it’s important for us to recognize the extent of the institutional threat we face. MIT is historically well-versed and well-practiced in its methods for disrupting productive political and social use of its properties, and MIT acts in this way to protect its money, as do many other institutions that find themselves governing land. So we must be careful: Columbia University has threatened student protestors congregating in open spaces with suspensions just as MIT has. Harvard just evicted an anti-Zionist graduate student protestor from their on-campus housing days ago, and Brown University had 20 protestors arrested by police for ‘trespassing’ on its campus; Brandeis University enlisted the City of Waltham’s police department to arrest protestors after dechartering their campus’ chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

None of this is to say that we should stop; we must keep going, especially in light of these tactics (and if anything, these tactics should make clear to us that what we’re doing has the potential to be genuinely impactful).

All of this is to say: stay safe.

All power to the people; and free, free Palestine. Free the Democratic Republic of the Congo; free Sudan.

p.s. Necessary disclaimer: my views do not reflect the views of any of my employers, of any student groups/organizations, or of any of my comrades or affiliates.

p.p.s. Links:

Democracy Now Coverage of Campus Protests

Oil in Gaza

Timeline of Protests at MIT on November 9th

Closure of Senior House

More Reporting, from Senior House Folks

Bexley Hall Demolition

First Person Accounts of MIT’s East Side Counter-Culture

MIT’s Connections to Imperialism

Borrowing from and expanding on an idea I first came into contact with via menswear writer @dieworkwear on Twitter (who himself borrows from Chomsky): I submitted that to me, beauty is a construction akin to language. Less abstrusely, it’s a coherence or sense-making exercise. It can (and often does) exist outside of countenance and clothing, and applies in my mind to all varieties of presentation. Argumentation, arrangements, verities, varial flips; if someone is putting together a sentence using the language of their medium and its references, then their work is beautiful. This referential or semiotic context can still be original or heretofore unseen, maybe even hard or unpleasant to deal with, unsightly in its meaning despite its coherence; but, if its expression is clear and its components are syntactically soundly placed, a thing can be beautiful. I think this was an attempt to step outside of my ego, recognizing that beauty is not simply a question of personal taste but a channeling of past, spirit, and perception, into future; in doing so, I made beauty dependent almost entirely on legibility. 

Something’s openness, vulnerability, or accession to being read is what we define as its legibility: can we parse what we’re seeing? Beyond the words on the page, is it comprehensible? What is or isn’t is of course context-dependent, language-dependent, and reference-dependent; but interacting with a thing on its own terms feels as fair an assessment as possible. This is nearly impossible to do as one person—no one among us contains the depth and breadth required to attempt what I’m proposing—but this is where subjectivity becomes relevant: what is readable, and moreover what is enjoyable to read or what we take from what we read, is what distinguishes tastes. Also, I favor language as an analogy because I then get to make my own silly SAT-esque word associations, e.g. AAVE is to English as Black is Beautiful is to Western textiles/advertising culture as Lo-Lifes are to Ralph Lauren.

There are some small problematiques of this formulation I’m working through… for instance: language shifts constantly and at varying rates in various geographies, so what is or is not a legitimate sentence changes frequently—how do we account for this re: legibility? A potential answer: perhaps ‘legible’ could share critical duties with ‘audible’? What we hear in spoken variants of languages encompasses a much vaster range of expression, verbiage, even slang, than what we see on the page, but what makes sense to our ears also shapes language in a more immediate way; so too can the vernaculars of our creative speech in familiar and unfamiliar forms alike. Fred Moten, famed Black theoretician and poet, offers that “[e]verything always needs new language. We constantly have to renew the language of any mode of inquiry”, and I’m inclined to agree. We can choose how lax we wish to treat the grammar of our amalgamated aesthetics; advancements in how we speak and write come from fucking language up, so how effectively we eff can become a metric for beauty as well.

All this aside, I have some unresolved questions that I’d like to leave for the reader as an exercise. As an example: I’ve talked about this before, but one of my favorite pastimes is the discovery and discernment of graffiti gripping walls, signposts, highway signs, and store windows. What I find beautiful about pieces and tags are their stylistic advances, their largesse, their placement—but the letters themselves are often barely decipherable. Is a throw-up beautiful because its dimensionality and shape descend from a certain regional tradition, because its history and prevalence tell me something new about its writer—or is it ugly because I can’t tell what it’s strictly ‘saying’?

Further: I think where things get a bit trickier is in the thick of making something legible to begin with…it’s been argued that legibility is the foundation upon which modern statecraft is erected. Making populations into social security numbers, race categorizations, genders, making land into borders and parcels, conscripting groups of people into tax codes—all of these operations allow public and private entities to in turn operate on us as distinct objects belonging to and abiding by papers (legal, monetary, and otherwise). How do we distinguish meaning-making from these sorts of bureaucratic bundlings, and avoid the attendant nonsense? Recently, I heard someone intelligent posit that governance and economic structures can be art too… I know the ‘legibility’ framework can accommodate this kind of argument, but should it?

Along these same lines: there are artifacts of language that are specifically coded against being read by such governing factors, chief among them the numerological signs that compose 5%er religiosity; drug and ‘gang’ slang fit in this box too, as would any other communications from the margins that are intended only for an audience situated along that same periphery. Are such expressions only valuable/beautiful in their originating contexts? Henry Louis Gates, Jr, is working on producing an “Oxford Dictionary of African American English”; is this a work of criticism? Is it a worthwhile endeavor? Is there a beauty in illegibility, a sort of post-structuralist stance? Human beauty is exemplified in our frontal orifices; less obliquely (and less sexually), we carry our prettiness in our faces. Yet seduction often necessitates a sly ambiguity of intention and of communication, a play that resists clarity—what do we do with this?

Related aside: the work of Hank Willis Thomas, particularly “The Embrace” in Boston Common, raises many questions; with much uproar at the sculpture’s vagueness relative to its intended communication (a commemoration of the love held by Martin Luther King, Jr, and Coretta Scott King, abstracted by Thomas into a set of bronze arms hugging), I’m curious—do Black artists have an unfair burden placed on them to be figurative/literal/readable?

Moreover: is there a violence inherent to reading or perceiving something? Schrodinger’s cat isn’t dead until we open the box; is it more cruel to check if it’s alive, or to allow the little guy liminality? Frank Wilderson, noted Afro-pessimist theorist, has argued in building his criticality re: Blackness that it is “a structural position of noncommunicability,” a relegation outside of being and out of the kind of readability that would ordinarily allow people citizenship. Even the colloquial “read for filth” offers us a negative framing for perception as beauty-seeing or beauty-making (as beholders of eyes, and so on).

I don’t have the answers to any of these questions; I don’t know if they’re even resolvable… all the same: I don’t have a better framework (or at least I don’t yet).

For more reading/watching on the subject:

“Kijani”, by Yasiin Bey, proffers haunting thoughts on beauty beyond death and how desire presents danger;

“On Beauty”, a poem I love by Khalil Gibran that I just want you to read;

and this interview with Fred Moten, which alternately appreciates and reproaches art criticism for how the field observes and reads works.

P.s. Special thank-yous this go-round to CJ Felix, the aforementioned homie with whom I talked flyness, and to Stephen LaFume for having a loooong and amazing conversation with me in Nubian Square at like 10:45pm that helped me sharpen my points 🙏🏽.

P.p.s. It’s my birthday today! I’m turning 24 :)

The 1s, among the last remaining workhorses in Boston, break a grin at the denizens of the Mandela Homes near their last stop in the heart of Roxbury: Nubian Square, offering shelter and community to 15 routes and over 100 individual buses every hour.

A 22 whizzes down Columbus Avenue in their dedicated middle lane, beaming with pride past cars in deadlock and waving to the two-wheeled motorists popping wheelies in Franklin Park; the 29 and 44 follow minutes later, chuffed to finally get priority.

Mr. Brand-Spanking-New Orange Heavy Railcar brings his friends from Jamaica Plain to downtown and beyond via Roxbury and the South End, chugging along underneath the Southwest Corridor Park and happily beeping and buzzing with new digital screens that belie the train’s irregular activity.

A Green Line trolley groans and moans over her hundred-year-long Sisyphean path to and from Chestnut Hill; once emerging triumphantly aboveground in Kenmore, now she rolls with an out-of-breath wheeze over the hump.

A crosstown 2 shuttles us from Allston to Sullivan Square, happy to stop infrequently on her merry, weary path across the BU Bridge.

The 80 completes its last rides through Somerville, down Medford Street and past the hulking public high school grounds before being phased out of service to retire; he ambles along on an hourly schedule, with plenty of time to rest and catch up with compatriots in East Cambridge.

A northwest-bound Red Line train inches through the Kendall Square tunnel into darkness at the other end, stinking of humidity-accrued sweat commingling with dry air-conditioned breezes.

Another two 66 buses and their 64 pal from earlier congregate outside of the Walgreens on the corner of Cambridge Street at the end of a long day, all headed the same way for a bit; the 66ers bid the 64 goodbye as they careen around the berm and are joined by an errant 57 en-route to catch a Sox game, swinging past Brighton Ave and Allston Street as I finally step off and traipse home.

Interrupting a week-long trip to the West Coast (the big pit stops being LA for four days, and Tacoma, WA for two nights and two days) to see friends and family, I decided to swing by Portland, Oregon, for a B. Cool-Aid night show at the Doug Fir Lounge. Their latest album, Leather Blvd, was interesting to me; the first single, “Cnt Go Back,” unfortunately set my expectations higher than the album could deliver on—the LP is largely neo-soul revivalist fare, attempting to restore the feeling that Dilla, ?uestlove, and D’Angelo brought to the marketplace…and it’s worth noting here that neo-soul is itself an attempted revivalist movement, calling on the ghosts of Sly Stone, Parliament, Roberta Flack, and Donny Hathaway… so I guess this project could be considered neo-neo-soul? Or “classic” neo-soul—and I’m not sure how worthwhile such an endeavor into the past ultimately is. It’s sort of like songs that sample a song that samples a song; we’re beyond the point of retreading, and now entering deadbeat horse territory, or however that idiom goes. I did enjoy the album on some level and I wouldn’t say it’s bad (a 6.7-7.5/10 on the Fantano scale), so my intellectual and personal tastes maybe differ in this regard.

I had shit-all to do during the day besides wait at my nearby AirBnB, so an iced matcha latté and recently purchased paint markers kept me company as I passed the time trekking 100-degree wet-heat and illicitly making my name known in what I later learned was the white side of town; what a time to be alive. A Tesla commandeered by Ali the Somali brought me to the venue, which was cool—lounge-y in a sense, perhaps more enjoyable if I’d been there with company but my solo adventure was barely rewarding—and tickets were only $15. Two songs by D’Angelo (both on Voodoo: “The Root” and “Africa”), two songs by Slum Village (“Players” and “Go Ladies” from Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 2), two songs by Knxwledge (one I couldn’t fully make out from the NxWorries album, and “So[rt]”, sampled for Kendrick Lamar’s “Momma”), plus one song from Dwele floated over the PA and filled the time after the opener exited stage-left. I’m not sure that this was ultimately a good move: these tracks definitely set the mood, but were also better than anything we’d hear in the following hour.

All the black people I’d been missing all day populated the downstairs bar and seating and about half of them were in interracial relationships, which, let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that jazz, but that felt very Portland nevertheless. Pink Siifu, a rapper and punk-rocker with an underground-eclipsing seminal release in his last album (a veritable Gumbo, or maybe decoupage, of black music history), carried most of the vocal and physical performing with his Badu-inflected attitude and slim body-rocking—points go to him for committing to the bit in his donnage of a full leather outfit (vest, pants, and crocodile-patterned loafers). Awhlee’s main contribution to the show ended up being his laptop with the tracks pre-loaded on it (and he hid behind said laptop for much of the show—I only realized halfway through that he was actually also singing). The highlights: “Cnt Go Back” (of course), their humorous crowd banter between songs (memorable quotes: from the audience, “it’s like strip clubs for vegans out here”; from Siifu, “if you conceive a child tonight, let us know. I’m tryna get niggas right!”), and Awhlee closing the show with a sophomoric + endearing unreleased track dedicated to chasing ass. A few numbers did surprise me, sounding better live than recorded; Siifu’s croaky intonation on “Streets Got Pages” crackled the in-house PA system, while “Neems (Naima)” softly rocked us with Stevie Wonder-like harmonica lines.

“Cnt go back” live!!!

Awhlee’s ditty to bid us adieu

A down-to-earth young designer who ~curated~ B. Cool-Aid’s tour tees (whatever that means) politicked with me for a few minutes about “the hustle” towards the end of the show; smoking a square outside during the let-out, I overheard a middle-aged white woman from St. Louis make a pass at him and a new friend of his. So it goes.

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5 minutes later, a gaggle of adolescent girls gather around a graffiti-adorned metal gate enclosing the offices of a bearing manufacturer; they crouch around one member of the group who poses for a picture against the throw-ups.

30 seconds post-haste: a bee, hobbling a crawl along the sidewalk as it nears its own end (predetermined by its shot wings), scrounges its fuzzy thorax and nearly orange body across the pavement

his colors (i’ve assigned him a name, and thus the name’s gender performance: Bertram, the male bee) are dulled by dust and the subjective and objective dusk of the evening.

Still, he ekes out an ovular path over four minutes, avoiding foot traffic just long enough to turn belly up.

What I read as a triumphant wiggle of self-selecting his time and place of death—a rare instance where a member of our chapter of life gets to go out on his own terms—winds up being a Hakeem Olajuwon dream-shake to cross up death and evade its tagging, fouling fingertips. Bertram flips back topside to continue his promenade. Once more, he arrives at rest; once more, he fights his way back into motion.

A fiery setting of sun witnesses his passage, pausing to first allow Bertram his home-going in the light.

I keep recording an approximate time-of-death for the small guy, but the bee would not abide by my silly proclamations

until 7:34 pm, on Wednesday, August 8th.

I watch over his body for a while; around quarter to 8, I let him be. Giving his corpse a scoop onto nearby soil with my notebook, I turn to start my walk home. The sun bid us both good bye.

Editor’s note: My friend Nat took the time to let me know that pretty much all bees we see outside are female; male bees really only venture out of their hives once in their lives to find a queen to mate with, and die in the process of said mating… I loved learning this for two reasons, 1) because Bertram was actually a shortie, and 2) because it colors the story an entirely different way. Much appreciation, Nat! 🫶🏾

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(sketches and captioning done by myself, photos sourced by Teen Eye)

As one of the most armchair-bound social critics, my analyses of commercialism and superficiality manifest in an annoying and questioning exterior, presented mostly as sheer precociousness on my part--essentially, I’m a smart ass and that aggravates people (rightly so). However, this critical outlook has developed into a search for similarly inquisitive figures--people to identify with throughout cultures in philosophy, politics, the arts, that questioned the goings-on of their day, from Karl Marx to Marvin Gaye and many in between.

I’ve been an avid rap fan almost my entire life--my dad would never admit to it, but he introduced me to the “vulgar” wares of Tupac and Biggie when I was 8 years old via his old Microsoft Zune mp3 player--and I always viewed this interest as parallel to but in no way related to attempts to philosophize.

Stumbling across Mos Def in an admittedly bumbling effort to expand my understanding of context New-York-hip-hop-culture-wise, I listened to his 1999 debut album: Black on Both Sides, from the intro track entitled “Fear Not of Man” through to the jazz-soul finale in “May-December” with detours into Brooklyn and battle rap culture. This was my first real exposure to “backpack”-rap on a legitimate, introspective level, and the first artist I’d listened to that was adamantly vocal on a myriad listing of social mires. After linking this to an existing connection to Common, poet-turned-rapper-turned-poet-again from Chicago, this consciousness and lyricism evoked in me an ability to understand stories and lives both familiar and unfamiliar to my own sheltered life. I re-listened to To Pimp a Butterfly, and 2014 Forest Hills Drive, while discovering anew wordsmiths like Talib Kweli, Isaiah Rashad, Lauryn Hill. This consumption led me to tunnels into underground hip hop and pioneers like Murs, Little Brother, and Clear Soul Forces, all of whom frame answers to my questions and the world’s threatening offerings in an ingestible way.

Through hip-hop, I was better able to understand Afro-centricity, mass incarceration, reparations, even materialism and power dynamics (listen: “Just Begun” by Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek, noteworthy guest appearance by Yasiin Bey; “I Gave You Power” by Nas). This culture and this lyricism also engendered my interest in slam poetry, and it has fueled numerous small, failed ideas and projects that have nonetheless inspired me and provided the armor I use to get by.

This armor works many duties; a spiritually-engaging protective force, I’d cloak myself in the knowledge and wisdom expounded by the mathematics-providing, tricknology-exposing members of the Nations of Gods and Earths, the Ansaru Allahs, and the Nation of Islam; from Jeru the Damaja to Jay Elec, Wise Intelligent to Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everything (KRS ONE), Ghostface to King Geedorah, our peoples oozed godliness and righteousness, cursing whiteness as a construction and unearthing Black agency from within. Factually deconstructing white supremacy, I took solace in the statistical understanding of our condition as proposed by Mos on ‘Mathematics’; a rejoinder to racialization, I found heart, devotion, and reclamation of our beauty in records like ‘Afro Blue’ (Erykah Badu and Robert Glasper), ‘Love’ (the Globetroddas), and ‘Brown-Skinned Lady’ (Black Star). From Common’s references across his discography to Black Power to Phonte Coleman’s encougaging recession-reckoning on “The Good Fight”, and tracks from parochial giants like the Bay Area’s Paris (‘The Days of Old’), enlivening politics bleed through our music, pushing our power.

Listening to hip-hop has become both an exposing and an insulating activity, as I use rap to connect with the world around me from within the cocoon of ‘conscious’ music to experience and interact with nuance. Don’t get me wrong: as a medium, there is much work to do in expanding this faction of hip hop, and in introducing anti-colonial constructions of sexuality and gender as themes of misogyny (to say nothing of the at-times-eclipsing misanthropy) and homophobia recur throughout much of the genre. However, I gain some glimmer of hope whenever I listen to ‘The World is Yours’, entreating the will to power to the next generation to do what they wish. The music buoys me over the turbulent and murky waters of life with commentary and relatable wit, thus providing me with the shielding necessary to plug through my day-to-day.

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A particular undercurrent keeps tugging on my leg as I attempt to move on from or move past my last dalliance with devotion; the mind wants to slip by, but quarrels and quandaries around sex grip my toes and wrap around my chest nevertheless. The subject bears enough continuous weight, that the only way out is through; these thoughts are the first to escape to surface and gasp for air.

I find myself immensely curious as to one aspect of the sexual revolution; seemingly a liberation, its ultimate effect of reducing the amount of (shared) sexual intimacy we experience constructs a paradox of freedoms less exercised once granted. (Shared) is a key intervention here; our experiences of sex in the day-to-day have been heightened greatly, but these are often solitary, or mediated digitally and commercially. We consume sexuality many times a week; via advertising, voyeurism, fashion aesthetics, and that p-word, we’re immersed in a world that is constantly selling us on horned-up visual and audio content, or trying to sell us via such wares. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the proliferation of online pornography and sexual, or sexually explicit, content, presides over an extreme dearth of genuine sensuality and intimacy in our media. The disillusionment we feel towards one another drives the lack of sex, and is driven in turn by the salability of sex without effort or personal involvement. Just as Marx illuminated our eventual alienation from the products of our labor, so we now see this detachment in our sexually reproductive lives. 

We can form parasocial relationships with online figures, dive into blackholes on x-rated sites, even conduct relations via text or video share; none of this requires vulnerability, disappointment, failure, taking a good long hard look at ourselves in the mirror, facing our fears around desirability, performance anxiety, impotence. Instead, we have the out of accepting the simulacra and taking a low risk, low reward, dopamine-hacked route to satisfaction. Addiction naturally attends; we can only fuck our brains up so much before they acquiesce to our paucity of discipline and scarcity of love.

This feels part and parcel to our general struggle towards relating to each other as human beings; we’re mostly lost in the wilderness of gender performance, of common decency, of behavior. New (and resurrected, or newly respected) formulations, structures, and strictures around how we exist as masculine, feminine, and non-binary or trans individuals are not always easily navigable; moreover, there are market incentives that pressure us to reveal ourselves and be vulnerable, while simultaneously critiquing how we show up. I struggled for years with how to be ‘masculine’ and how to relate to ego, confidence, and presence in this context; I still do wrestle with it, honestly. My man-ness (or relegation to the position of Man-Not) may limit my perspective here, but we aren’t particularly invested in truly unpacking what black male-ness is, either. There aren’t many spaces to be fully honest with each other; to be completely open about how we’re struggling with what gender means, what aspects of the prevailing gender orthodoxy we wish to challenge (and what aspects we can’t afford to let go of just yet), or where we wish to end up.   

Moreover, we haven’t arrived at conclusions on how we want to show up together in shared spaces. We go to the gym and fear surveillance, fear perception, fear harassment; the gym TikTok moment reflects a decline in our belief and participation in common spaces, in communal sexiness, and in looking good for other people. Working out, as proposed by social media practitioners, functions as self-improvement before anything else; seeking aesthetic perfection (as produced by monthly memberships, ‘clean eating’, smoothies, protein powders, pre-workout, and smelling salts) takes precedence over wanting to be seen. Self-objectification and self-beautification may find themselves subsections of the latest iteration to Maslow’s pyramid; we reach for actualization before establishing first our basic, and common, needs. The creepers and horndogs who make us uncomfortable or threaten our safety face something else entirely; the voyeurism that feeds our digital spaces disconnects us from humanity, and disenchants us from respecting those basic needs and wishes of our compatriots in gains. We’re social beings; but we just can’t figure out how to mediate that sociability. 

Our premier publications are now weighing in on the issue of etiquette as well; proffering situational advice and guidance on how to comport ourselves, pondering the breakdown of manners into the maintenance of individualized boundaries…but they’re just as lost as we are. We’re grasping at straws trying to figure out what our social rules are for how to be with one another. 

So it’s no wonder that sex and sexuality are welcome only to the extent that they can be made comfortable, to the extent that they can be removed from real love and emotion, to the extent that their presentation is legible (and not ugly, or unfamiliar, or truthful), to the extent that they are commodities; we haven’t figured out any of this co-existing thing. If I don’t know how to say hi to you, or look respectfully, or hit on you, how on earth will we know what to do in bed together? Withdrawing into online spaces and pulling away from close, visceral, heart-breaking relationships could make unfortunate sense as avoidant response to this confused reality. We’ll never get to a point where anything is sorted and uncomplicated; but I do think we should wade into the depths of this shit and get dirty sitting with it for a while. 

I’d like to share a related poem with this essay; it’s been sitting in my drafts for a month and a half, but I think this is the most opportune time for it to come forth. 

 
Ography

 
The door unfolds from its lip, pushed upwards

The lights cut on; it’s around 2:13 am

The furniture shifts and slides to make apparent the windows, 

Shaded in control and thus made private

Lurking incognito, a home owner makes a pact with himself that this is the very last time.

Searching forlornly for innocence: he settles on emptiness.

Disrobing sloppily as if in a haze, the blinds rattled down to sills.

Vision focused on one window in particular

For a moment, anything and everything feel possible

His heart opens, quickens, races

Breaths pulled shallow, mind scattered, emotions awry,

He sheds a tear.

Windows are shuttered

The wallpaper comes back into frame.

His mind deadens

The back lights fade

The laptop closes.

How do you share your linguistic treacles?

How does your phrasing linger; does it rub off on people?

What I mean to say is simple, I keep tripping on my ego: 

what larks will your words travel when heard in hearts? 

(Is it that deep, though?)

Are there hallmarks that your patterns in my ears impart?

My teeth’s holes 

tend to hold onto words that are mine own quite feeble.

Will you have me talking like I’m from Philly?

Will my tongue stutter-step till consonants bleed whole? 

My lips popping p’s with the emphasis of hard needles.

Appropriate your bombast, my words change like beat flows

A stretching of my verbiage to trust in the strange glee hopes

My birthplace taught me gender-neutered ‘shortie’, I been hip to the lingo 

since I heard that shit redux as a young boy on long Fort Greene strolls

New words run my palate’s grounds, 

catching up but I’m smooth with the linguals

a friend with heart of gold and the hands of a young Deebo

Our minds melded by cadence and tempo of glued phrase, 

words a free flow

Taught me validity as is, in a bevy of new ways 

(and speech quotes)

Our roots create syntaxes of joy out of anguish,

peep yo.

My mans ‘nem are my language 

You can hear them in the timbre of my key notes.

much love and appreciation to many many many of my friends, acquaintances, and passersby for shaping how I speak (and really, how I interact with the world). Also, big shout-out to CJ and Noir, especially, for allowing me to read a working version of this to them!!

Many thanks also to my father; I think in a lot of roundabout ways, I try to be him. I don’t think I’d be a writer if I wasn’t trying to emulate the way he tells, shares, and treasures stories, and the way he puts a sentence together. Happy belated Father’s day to you, Dad!!!

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knees swing freely but hips pull tight;

weight presses forward with each step past dusk as they thieve time from the night.

A soul traverses the curse and blessing of its journey on its own rite/right;

of self and of passage;

The trek is lonely less you call upon the massive;

a community’s cacophony pours in as free jazz, can you grasp it?

can you excavate your cavities and last it, I ain’t seen my man since

he allowed the depths of his waters to wash over him with naan wince;

gods and earths pulsate, sensate as plans rinse.

heavy-laden lids take in the world at glimpse;

pupils fill to their black brims.

Is it cruel to seek self-honesty or askance?

Can I witness godliness without religion, in the surveillance of my black kin?

Seeking knowledge first started at the other, trying to unmask it, before eyes turned towards the only son of my mother.

Whispering a prayer unto the ummah I share with each and every one of my brothers.