4TT3MPT1NG T0 B3 W33D-L1K3...

attempting to be weed-like,

blossoming despite efforts

to impede my existence

SONG OF THE DAY: 1 Down, 3 To Go

Much love to all genres and songs that defy the 3-minute rule, an antiquated relic of radio airplay rules. Fuck the music industry. Fuck everything actually. Anything that becomes an industry has embraced listening to some asshole explain shit in a fucked up way that goes against whatever inspirational nonsense caused the thing to exist in the first place. Death to all industries.

SONG OF THE DAY: Until Then

Malcolm X just had a birthday… well obviously he didn’t have it, because he was assassinated a long time back, and I often think about how one of America’s greatest most recent philosopher/thinker/activists was taken from us. He was only 39 at the time of his shooting, and had experienced such rapid political and philosophical growth in his adult years. His pilgrimage to Mecca and visit to Africa had been a pretty impactful period on expanding his outlook as well, and that had only happened in the year before his death. It’s also noteworthy because African nations had just begun to gain independence from colonial rule in that same decade. His influence likely would have extended well beyond just African-American culture, or even just African diasporic culture. It all seems so relevant too because we’ve got the same fucking bullshit going on in America, like we’ve been stuck in this cultural quagmire we can’t escape because nobody’s tried to actually fix any of it. The oft-quoted clip from Malcolm talks about healing, and how healing involves pulling the knife out of someone’s back, and letting them heal the wound, when America hasn’t even acknowledged it put the knife in people, nor pulled it out.

But also always relevant to the discussion of Malcolm, and his assassination, is the divisive techniques of the powerful. That famous pic of Malcolm peeping out the window holding an M1 was done not in reference to the FBI or CIA, but the threat on his life that was presented by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Part of Louis Farrakhan’s ascent to power was built off his dedicated resistance to Malcolm. Of course there was quite a bit of collusion between intelligence agencies and police groups back then to fuck up black activists, but if you go pulling the threads of FBI involvement in the Nation of Islam/Malcolm X feud, and even sort of distant preservation of the Nation of Islam, shit gets murky (as all conspiracies do).

Mostly though, I just lament the fact I re-read Malcolm X speeches or essays fairly regularly, most of which composed during the last decade or so of his life. And he never even made 40. Imagining what he could’ve accomplished had he been allowed to continue to grow and develop is a depressing stream of thought. Lots of times, in our American-centric perspective, we tend to lump Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr. together, but I think about Malcolm with Patrice Lumumba, the brilliant Congolese pan-Africanist, who also was assassinated in 1961. Both these men were not just activists visibly resisting world systems in place, but they were people who had shown rapid growth as thinkers, both of which cut short before they made 40. And definitely relevant as we get into the last stretch of a Presidential Election where two bumbling old ass white dudes compete to not fuck up the worst and become the alleged leader of the alleged free world for another four years, or more. Lolol, anybody who thinks this world system that’s still in place is a good and beneficial one is a goddamn fool.

Anyways, check out this track by Marcel P. Black, conscious Baton Rouge rapper. Sometimes I forget to attach the prose to the song, but figured I’d better today, because Marcel’s a good dude, and he’s got a bandcamp, so you can support dude directly, which is important since nobody can tour or do shows currently.

TH3 SP4C3 1 F1ND MYS3LF...

the spaces I find myself

most at peace tends to be those

forgotten by mainstream thought

MY D3ST1N4T10N R3M41NS...

my destination remains

unknown - sometimes I use maps,

other times intuition

SONG OF THE DAY: Secrets and Escapes

There’s a few nice spots I’ve found or people have shared with me that are perfect monasteries of late capitalist decline – mixtures of industrial decline, graffiti, and survival-based existence where the houseless find homes where society’s all-knowing all-judging eyes leave them the fuck alone. I try not to share these spaces with too many people, especially not online. Sharing shit online is essentially snitching, maybe not automatically to the police but definitely to people who don’t understand or respect the codes of illegal or barely legal existence. Just because places exist like this, and people go there, doesn’t mean you automatically should.

I think about this a lot with regards to the internet, how all this information is just right there for anyone to have a superficial knowledge about everything on earth (that’s been exposed to the internet). There’s no guidance, no teacher to say, “Well yes, it’s an old factory that’s been abandoned for decades, but some people are living in there too so don’t just roll up in there loud as fuck, breaking bottles and shit.”

Quarantine times have shown that electronic escapes don’t satisfy the same physiological urges that physical escapes do. I’ve been trying to walk more, like two hundred miles a day, and had posted a bunch of haiku to an Instagram story one time, but it drained the battery on my shitty old iPhone, and it died halfway through so that I had to finish it when I got home, which was kind of stupid. So I’ve been carrying notecards in my pocket instead, and making stories of tanka that way. The battery never dies. It has reminded me that electronic escapes are not necessarily escapes but re-routes where we are avoiding the path we probably should’ve been taking in the first place.

It’s such a blessing on a long ass meandering pilgrimage somewhere or another to stumble upon some sort of abandoned place that you didn’t know about, that nobody told you about, enter it, and get to know it. Every place has these fucked up accumulations of experience that stain it, positively and negatively. I was in one recently, in pretty good shape actually, and there were these weird prayer art things in one section, normal graffiti in other, and I went to a back corner of one outbuilding in this complex and left a couple dirtgod haiku scribbles as well. These have become my favorite poems I write, scattered out in the world, maybe not seen by anybody ever, or only seen by a few humans who could give a shit less. I wrestle at times with whether or not I’m a “real” poet or “real” artist or writer. I got a poem published earlier this year, even though I’m horrible at trying to publish anything, basically because a co-conspirator of the illegitimate artz specifically requested I send something. So I did. It was cool, I guess, to send out links on various social medias about “hey I got a poem published” and a bunch of people I don’t really know clicked little hearts to acknowledge they saw the post, most of them likely without even clicking the link to see the actual poem. I know without a doubt that even if it’s only nine people over the next two years, every person who sees those dirtgod haiku scribbles in that far corner of the forge outbuilding in the abandoned factory complex, each one of them will actually see that haiku. Without a doubt. No having to follow links to other spaces, or tapping a symbol to give me false data suggesting there’s a higher likelihood they saw it. Every person who goes in that room will actually have seen it. That’s way more real, whether I can know it happened or not. In fact, despite human’s consisted insistence we still have scientific dominion over the Earth, I’d say people can never know what’s ultimately real. Life gets a whole lot easier when you accept that shit.

4TT3MPT1NG T0 B3 W33D-L1K3...

attempting to be weed-like,

sowing myself in corners

lacking militant eyeballs

SONG OF THE DAY: Sky Turned Cry

Humans are highly melodramatic animals, bless-cursed with synapses sparks that suggest there is purpose to existence beyond simply existing. Because of this, humans will lament the smashing together of their broken systems, which have long been failing them in any deep or meaningful sense, and indulge worried proclamations of end times, which are not even true callings of an observed event on the horizon, but just the cries of child creatures hoping to scare away their own fears in the dark of what they cannot comprehend. These are not human systems of existence breaking apart, but human systems of comfort, which not everybody even has anyways. American prosperity got a better view of the world by stepping a jackboot on the throat of the global South, which has continued to this day. Anti-everything activists make their social media calls to arms and plot their secretive signal conspiracies on handheld computers full of conflict minerals, exploited labor, and innate material privilege. Nothing is ending. The something you think needs fixing never existed in the first place, beyond the schoolbook lessons sown into your young fertile minds anywhere on the planet from the most tender and pliable age.

I have helped procreate three children, the oldest of which I remember wondering if it as appropriate or not to watch George Bush the Younger give televised justifications for wars on the global South after Hulk Hogan kicked over the towers on 9/11, when he joined the New World Order for good (but bad), while they were just a toddler. Back then, they were she, because pronouns were binary and we hadn’t all been distracted by a google of digital streams to confuse our own innate stream of consciousness. The younger two of my offspring have lived in a confusing and unsettling time. A thing I always tell them (once they are old enough to handle this, and I don’t think I’ve said it to the youngest yet, who is only 12 still) is that even if we have population cataclysm, and 80% of humans die off in a decade, that’s still a billion people on this planet. People will keep walking into the future, stubbornly, and piecing together new shelter from the rubble, and slowly rebuilding that shelter into something comfortable, and repeating the same settled patterns humans have done ever since they stopped wandering and planted corn in abnormal rows.

“Why not you?” I ask my children, because fuck it, somebody has to live through tomorrow. I’ll do my best to trudge into as much future as I can, but my knees and ankles ache more than they used to, and if it’s too cold and damp, I get a limp to my right hip a little bit, like god has slapped a metaphysical ankle monitor on me to keep me from running away too far too fast. That’s how age does. But fuck it, I can stubbornly walk more miles than most hominid creatures half my age too tethered to rapidly deteriorating notions of home, which are starting to have those diminishing returns of empire’s that are still trying to ride the ripples of splashes from previous eras. The names given to the land I live on might change – no government is eternal, and fuck it, I might even have a handful of aliases to go by myself, depending on the circumstance, but the end ain’t fucking here yet. Not today, not in November, not in the next decade, never. Time is bullshit – just those same ripples of empire trying to force order and productivity and industrial mindset onto once natural human beings. Even if I die, it’s not the end, so fuck it… I’m gonna keep walking.