The Dead Emcee Scrolls (11 page)

Where I live

Music notes take the form

Of dollar signs

Souls sing backup

While material desires

Sing solo

Somewhere between self-hate and Brooklyn

I sit on a mountain of green-leafed questions

Searching for balance in the mist

I used to rock beats over lunch room tables

Now I'm searching for balance in the midst

And I find bliss in mental tugs of “what for?”

'cause they make me think I'm deep

Raising dead questions like a grammatical visionary

Who can only see the past in the future

Come one come all

I can make the blind walk

“And I run through discotheques like sound.”

Figuring I'm bound to hear something

That I can nod my head to

But everything is “For the killers

And the Hundred Dollar-Billers”

And “Real Niggas who ain't got no feelings”

I got mad feelings

And stay broke

Too broke to buy a magnum

Or a state of mind

To help my thoughts go platinum

I was discovered by Gold

Mined and marketed as meat

Erased of my memories

So I'd have the freedom to think

I discovered that which discovered me

And then made it my God, mistakenly

I take shots of molasses

So I can slow my existence

And feel the world

Spinning on its axis

I want to feel revolution

For myself

Fuck the Franz Fanon books on the shelf

I mean, really,

I just want to dance

'cause I remember when

We used to back spin and windmill

Breakbeats wouldn't let niggas stand still

We'd feel the music

Begin to swipe and spin

'til we were dizzy

From revolution

On the dance floor

They call dancing primitive.

They call singing senseless.

Some have forgotten to hum.

They are too busy with the

“how to” and “why.”

My culture will never die.

It lives in the wind.

“… and the very rocks will cry out.”

Skyscrapers will fall

Your lack of understanding

Will crush you down to “primitive.”

Maybe all of us.

We all travel the same road. Alone.

Blinded by the brightness of darkness, I stepped forward into a world where shadows precede breath. I could feel all of my pores opening to the point of being enveloped by openness: a black whole. Being entered by the many colors of darkness, the bows that precede the rain, as humid as the center of a raindrop, I began to orbit my new realm. There was no looking back.

I had no eyes. But language dictated that I saw. I was all eyes just as I was all else. Surrounded by a darkness that held the unmuted intensity of every color in its shadow. We were one and millions.

My name. Somebody was calling my name. I saw no one. Then I realized that that which I was hearing as my name wasn't, but was the sound of unmuted colors gathered in the wind, swirling against time. The sound of bright resonant darkness. The sound of orphan shadows rejoicing in the light. And that was my name. It was all of our names. And I, too, joined in the calling.

I perform biopsies

On cyclopses

So that I might better understand

My third eye

Dissecting words

May be clever

But I aim to live verbs

To be

Calculating the distance

From here to forever

The square root of me is circular

But such calculations

Are a waste of time

And pre-occupation with time

Is a waste of life

But what am I

Supposed to do

With this calculator?

Too many caged birds

Sing of dreams deferred

Too few chance beyond

The Maya of these hues

Siblings of soil

Soiled and shunned

Gather your seeds

A garden of guns

Armored archaic

Garnished by sun

Guiltlessly growing

A garden of guns

Petalled with passion

Tended by nuns

Target tomorrow

A garden of guns

An un-aimed bullet