The greatest deficit is being gendered female. The greatest distress is not wanting to be a man. To not be a man because it doesn’t feel right or even wholesome. It’s not a repulsion but it’s not at all pleasing even as an idea. Being female only inhabits the feminine aura with a female spirit eye and the innate desire to say something. To say all things. The female has one desire, that is, to be and to do. What…
We have to eat the world slowly. Ten years, 25 years, forty years, 62 years, 95 years. No rush. Small bites. This world is an overpowering place capable of squeezing the life out of you while all the while you are laughing with extreme joyful pleasure. We each get a single experience called life, but it is such a vast and complex experience that we must break it into bits to relish the fullness, or not. Some of my friends…
A question posed at lunch while in Barnes & Noble. (Bookshops should not have food, though I enjoy the meals, eating in a bookshop destroys the essence and aesthetics of a Bookshop, but never mind…for now). She suddenly looked up from her book and bowl of Mac & Cheese topped with crumbled Bacon and said, “Grandma, what happens to your imaginary friend when you stop talking to it?” Taken aback, I…
Yet every time it is spoken other voices recognize and rise up to kill it. Shut it down, shut it up, lock it up, cut the tongue The corner susurrus, the store front ruminations, the stoop sermons, the bedroom supplications, the workplace divide and conquer, the hospital segregation/poor drugs/rich drugs the roadside confrontations/random et al the thoughts and prayers, Al Sharpton is tired/Jesse spent. yes indeed! the Negro is a spoken language not received; The Negro speaks like this, I…
She did not burst upon the scene like a meteor, she came in increments like a baby down the vaginal canal, head, shoulders body etc. she came quietly and took her place in the conversation. From that first day that she sucked her first the air in the bedroom where she was born, she did not care to know that her mother who had just agonized to usher her into the world was almost in shock post delivery. Instead, she…
Music is that other thing. And God saw that it was good/ and caused it To make all kinds of feelings and bring new words/ to spit from your mouth/ that nowadays spit from your fingers. Your keyboard has all the unwritten answers and knows all your business because you may delete delete, but it remembers every stroke you strike. Once you strike a letter and conjure a word and make some sentences and once you think about them and…
In the desert there is no time, no measure of such an idea. in the desert what do you do for sanity/ talk to God in language of the soul/ the wind/errant sand particles in your eyes, your nose, your hair/ You meditate and expect the stars for you to wander by, you see the moon you say, aha! its night. Night or day, it’s all that you know. not minutes, not hours, not weeks in the desert there is…
A PREAMBLE TO MY ADVANCED READER DAVE, REGARDING THE BOOK “GHOSTS”. I am not purging, although I am in a sense. I am not going to die, as yet. “We die, that may be the meaning of life. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html We do language. That may be the measure of our lives” For me those lines come out to mean we are all going to die as my parents did and others that I have heard of. So with that as a backdrop I…