Slum Serenade

"YES THEY DESERVE TO DIE, & I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!"

2011-02-17T00:26:00.000-08:00

"Everything's changing around me.... and I want a change too. Cuz one thing I know, it ain't cool bein no fool. I feel different today. I don't know what else to say... but Imma get my shit together. It's not or never"

-The Roots

This quote has characterized the last half a year of my life.

That's enough about that.

I've often gotten criticism from a generalized group of people I call the "Religious," (note: many people I love fall into this category, and I don't mean it to be derogatory, even though I think that it's a selfish and ignorant path to be religious, for the most part) and I've heard this particular critique: "You atheists don't have anything but to knock down religion, you don't do anything worthwhile except hate."

Allow me to define my position for myself: My critique of religion stems from the obvious personal effect that doctrine has on my life. After all, a religious person does NOT simply admire the millions of wondrous mysterious questions that spring from the world and all its trillions of physical, social and biological combinations, but instead offers an extensive and detailed belief in a singular system of explanation that gives a framework of how those wonders came to be. In the major three, this includes a system of value judgment, on which a "nonbeliever" falls in one of two categories, eternally contrasted as "heaven" and "hell."

So now, even though your imagination has cast me into eternal damnation, my interpretation of reality is rude in challenging this belief? Please, help me sort this one out.

YOU think I'm eternally damned, I think you're temporarily ignorant. Which is worst? Which is more "hateful?"

K, that's all I have battery to write about for now.

2006-12-23T23:23:00.000-08:00

I can’t get off this Legendary Roots Crew tip, and I’m stuck at the fresh frontier of the Philly funk birth. Do You Want More?! is the jazziest rhetorical question I’ve ever given spin.

I haven’t written in a while, and I know why. It’s because I can’t be a bite-mark on a #5 pencil; I want to simultaneously be a blind man and his frantic guide, swept over by a sudden gust of philanthropy, describing every whiff, drop and snare that swirls around their crowded Avenue without a stutter and laced in a leisurely swag (called paragraphs by most). That might sound more like this track than a goal, but these notes are ethereally dizzying, and their strums are a stumble. Rhythm is half the battle, and the rest of it is organized frenetics.

But I’m starting anyway.

Definitions:

Coast (kōst) n.: A wet limb, stirred ‘til everything in between orange and purple by a sweltering cotton swab.

Tomato (tə-mā'tō, -mä'-) n.: William Carlos William’s best friend and face greeter by lyrical dead ends.

Words (wûrd) n.: Clay-- nothing to be prostrated before, but prone to shard spitting explosions in the oven of ceramic tactics.

The Rapture ([thē before a vowel; thə before a consonant] rāp'chər) n.: my, (not to be confused for ‘your’) concern, anything irreverence can burn.

I don’t believe a word I say.

2006-10-24T00:27:00.000-07:00

How I feel about my Boss: Suheil abu Fadil is a lumpy, cantankerous man with a boyish waddle and stumpy legs. He slips a million secret chews to his dumb, thin pursed lips; forever locked in the silly slump of a stern frown. His sloppy Syrian Arabic is slurred and perpetually ebbing frantically back into his mouth in salivating slurps; soaked with slobbery 'Shayif shlown's (Arabic's "yaadamean?") When he smiles, his crooked teeth are exposed by his skin-flap curtain upper lips, crawling nefariously towards his crusty ears. His dusty eyes only match in their dull tone, like an emerald and a sapphire caked with dust and chucked unceremoniously into the bottom of two empty fisherman's seafood gut-buckets.

2006-06-23T02:54:00.000-07:00

I have a laugh like a well-fed pelican.

I have a razor thin addiction to idiosyncrasies.

My favorite sound is the icy “tink” that follows cold air from the cooler door, after I take a glass bottle out of a well-stocked row and the weight from behind fills up the empty space I’m creating with a buck and some change at the register.

My favorite whim is an unadulterated dose of dizzying poetic expression; unacknowledged and tantalizingly fluttering between my ears.

I want a government which will stand at the edge of an unclaimed diamond shaft, casually reach in for a chunk of crumbling black coal, and eloquently graffiti the anecdotes that color streets on the banal white spaces of revered buildings and monuments with it. Then they would proceed to lounge in admiration, throw back a cold one and thank god that bold writing material is so abundant.

Ripe pulsation throbs into every mango’s spot-colored dream, deep and creamy in its lifelike density; dripping flavor and leaving deep paint stains on its emerald bedsheets.

Millions of right-clicks pierce millions of desktops as we speak. A photograph called “home” quaintly opts itself as a desktop background:

As though hardened by dried rosewater, and plumped by shrimp pigment, the cushiony walls of home and their protective embrace of his blue square window reminded Hanthala of a swimming pool amidst a field of thorny rosebushes. He painted that window himself, taking pride in steadily applying the thick layers, like a miraculous tide rushing to drown emaciated brown staccato; controlling the white, mist shrouded vanguard—the paintbrush bristles—a chilling crest, rolling over the ocean floor and capping enormous water explosions.

Leaning on the wall with the homegrown reliability only his father’s calloused hands could orchestrate, the spice rack held thyme bundles, aromatic lilacs drying in the sun and several vines full of the grape leaves swallowing its lower levels and crawling around that side of the house, voraciously gobbling up a meandering wooden fence in the process.

He was even glad to see his mother’s red firework bursts with prickly green smoke trails growing from a pot.

This was his milieu. He was home at last.

2006-06-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

If there is a god, he might exist in the micro-alley in between blur circles on the rainy lens of a nebulous stare. She might sit on the rocky fringe of a brick wall, teetering and threatening wood splinters or skin penetration from that rusty nail bent 90 degrees and sprinkled with unhealthy looking orange rust speckles. It might swim DNA-shaped laps around the metaphysical cylinder-river that sits in between eye-to-eye implicit conversation. Maybe they’re entrapped in a dew drop slithering off the five millionth corn bead (counted from the North) in an indigenous South American countryside. Maybe He was a voracious conversationalist who ran into a bearded merchant 1500 years ago for a philosophical lecture or two. Maybe cadences battle for her hand in marriage when the resonance of Eastern musicians’ string plucking overwhelms peace of mind. Maybe it ended twice, and when the credits ran, they got sucked into a vacuum, jumbled up and confused, re written into a poem and crumbled up; thrown into the otherwise empty stomach of a chicken-wire garbage basket.

Anything more specific would be a pretentious description of my spiritual experience.

2006-05-30T03:48:00.000-07:00

so sometimes I like listening to piano jazz, and compensating for my inability to play anything but the radio by pretending that the keyboard is my piano, as a matter of fact I’m doin’ it now, it’s an exercise I like to call letter pluckin’, and I do it while listening to some of the hippest jazz cats who constantly throw around fingertips like orange sunsets, or fire-ink on a sky paper that turn their banal tarps pale orange with pink tendencies and mellow immediacy that can’t help but weave and leave as soon as it turns the wayward flickering-in-the-distance soul as present as it can get under an expanse it can’t expand …

comparison ‘cause its one of those intellect stretch projects where I take two ostensibly unrelated songs and mesh them together, making clack and smack sound like ding and fling, where background ceases to be reality and those cats who can pound melody are knitted like something my grandma made, through vibrant threads of letter-note, ivory-cheap plastic, Toshiba-smithsonean or whatever else can be considered a piano brand… sense doesn’t mean all that much, and those collages that sit in every template art room kinda sing the same thing, with that ever-present eye featured in its home magazine, clipped with other smatters like a colorful whiz platter glued on and humbled by its anarchy and its ever down to earth lack of specificity… this is what spirituality looks like, a dabbling keyboard thrown into a pot of steaming syllables, bouncing melting conflicting like so many crashes and silly embraces with awkard moments and perfection sizzling at the top and sinking slowly to the piping pit of the aluminum bottom all at once….

I can go along with this type-it-up thing as frantically and finger flyingly as Oscar P and Thelonious “you’re ownin’ this” Monk can glide along their word processor that drops ringlike sounds and slaps them together in a fluid joint exercise that dances around metronomes and shade-rockin’ drummers slightly slappin’ cymbals. They’ve got periods and punctuation, and the flow sometimes gets dropped faster and slower, but it’s always in harmony even if colloquial meets urban and rustic in a cocktail lounge where old professors linguistic tautness gets hopped on like a trampoline, and sometimes the dings match like the cool cat cymbal smackers aforementioned who, sitting on the outskirts of the jump device, lookin’ perpetually to the sole landscape that graces their aesthetic direction make it seem like a tambourine to the ruffled surveyor named sparrow brushing past puffy chunk clouds, makin’ feather-nebula medleys that spiral into straight-up blue and don’t come to an opera house near you. Where’d Oscar go wrong when he slipped into this staircase fall with notes being ribcage slapped ever so gently, while sparrow still sings and hears the slow crackin’ vibes of down-below singin’ paradise to any non-believer

enter the collapse, the song spasms that dance and flail, finertips and garbage pails, trying to fly as wantonly as air force bombers and throwing scrabble letters into the dizzying sweat house that bumps and pumps as though they never met the cracks they crumbled into, swinging and making funny glides away from the distance and towards the inseperable chasms that had no nuances when they say down together to enjoy the relapse of real or the elapse of steel

2006-05-22T02:34:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written in a while. The serrated avocado green sits under the word “haven’t” and smatters Microsoft word with the charm of cumbersome grammatical nuances. The blinking letter generator awaits electric jolts of nerve-prodding into the flat letter sequences laid out at my fingertips. A valley of white pulsates underneath a three sentence by six-inch size ten Times New Roman block of invading space fences called letters. Gravity becomes a slow, verbose crawl and the ground is ever-sinking and never approaching.

It’s summer time, and I can [type] again.

2006-04-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

Unsung radicalism exists in the fractures of the asphalt machine. Afeni’s kid called the floorplan’s fissures a fertile heart of a beautiful Diaspora; the cracked concrete and the clenched-fist rise of a blood-red rose.

Radicalism is the blood crevice; the deep purple bruise; the serrated scar tainting humanity’s beautiful brown skin and testifying to Her liberation from the machine. Every accomplishment is blemished; and discolor accumulates. It slips lifelessly into the underground; the crude home of the quivering, dripping, peeled, bloody pulp, barely-humans who never made it out of the system’s saw-like cave. These pulp-people have no fingerprints to prove their existence, just watery blood splashes. The buzzing drone of their subterranean wailing is a masochistic Siren’s song, and:

“we feed off of finger pricks from CEOs who come to pluck our strewn gardens and meet sharp stems. Growing, pulsating beneath the earth, becoming livers, becoming spleens, becoming bloody vessels intertwined beneath the blacktop-encrusted earth; our skin. Our feeble existence is communal, we share throats when we need air and we split veins when pale skin begins to rot. We pump; our pain ripples sloshing, gushing, dripping. Our ribcage cracks and hunger rumbles collide. We breathe, gasping for blood guzzled air, feeling pain in movement, watching through necessity for lack of eyelids. We feed off one another, growing, pulsating beneath the earth, becoming a heart, becoming lungs, holding hands and interlocking elbows in the airtight lake of fluid pressure. We hose down raw gut tunnels and twitch ‘til harmony becomes staccato. We burn and ferment, letting the agitation sizzle, becoming nerves, becoming joints, becoming a skeletal king’s ransom, we become a brain. We become organs.”

Sunrise emerging from beneath the eyelid of mountains stares furiously upon the concrete, blinding it with white, threatening it and watching it soak tacit fire. The heat meets friction. An earthquake, like a large stomach rumbling, is crisp enough a whip crack to scatter piping lifeless cement, and heaven sent a shower called rain to clean the remnants.

Revolution is a garden.

2006-03-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

my prose lines
hit hard like clotheslines

2006-03-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

Hyperbolic

Olive ‘Ali smokin’ trees
Bulldoze rubble’s life on knees
Shoot some pool? Red pool from shot.
rotten luck or fetid rot?
I’m starving and
I’ll die of thirst
we too condensed
we gonna burst

thirst and rot are synonyms
wit’ solemn hymns and piping rims

tough as nails and prison shanks
nextdoor jails and rocks and tanks

infirmity with gritty cough
forty seven Kalashnikov

hope and bones and dreamy sun
melting, smoking, bitterfun
hyperbole
is on the run

.........................................................................................................................................................................

True writers are solipsistic.

Always searching, they rummage through pounds of literature and burn their eyes on black ink, developing an uncanny resistance to papercuts like a dark shaft to a diamond miner’s calluses.

True writers are recognized at their local bookstores, scouring shelf after shelf and purchasing books which are tenuously connected at best. The employees often huddle in hushed discussion (there’s always that interesting tension in bookstores. It’s not quite a library, so the rule of tranquility doesn’t necessarily dictate the place, but it seems to implicitly emerge when voices are raised) about the true writers’ purchases, trying to piece together whether the true writer is a communist or a libertarian; a Buddhist or an existentialist; a lover or a fighter.

The edges of a True Writer’s library cards are worn into round, whitewashed skidmarks and every visit is frantic and ostensibly aimless.

The true writer’s relationship with prose is an infinite meander.

Then, hypnotized by a pale light staring into their faces, they wildly immerse themselves in the beautiful realization (a guilty pleasure, a nighttime addiction) that what they’re looking for is rapidly being created under their frenzied fingertips.

It has yet to be written.

........................................................................................................................................................................

In other news: Jay Z is the new Hammarabi, ‘cause around 1780 BCE, Hammarabi coined our favorite commandment of nomadic justice: “An eye for an eye, a leg for a leg, an arm for an arm…” Jigga provided an eloquent update: “Now if you shoot my dog, I'ma kill yo' cat/Just the unwritten laws in rap - know dat”

Mos definitely.

2006-03-27T00:56:00.000-08:00

I wish I had some watermelon: a trickling black dew poppyfield mountain range (the deepest right corner of a bloodsplashed matador’s cape), sunbathing in a cornfield hide with rich green and pale kernel white weaves cupping its expansive hand under a succulent sunset.

I would never purchase a mutant watermelon with no seeds. A watermelon with no seeds is like one of those bougie teenage pseudo-rebels who channel their angst through MTV and other glossy venues of commercialized anguish. Just spit them out!

2006-03-26T00:55:00.000-08:00

A blind solipsist and a jazz pianist met in a suicide bomber's unruffled dream
A blind solipsist and a jazz pianist met in a suicide bomber's unruffled dream
through the dawdling dance of smoke, they sat on a fault line slope, a volatile plateau
where they sipped on a waterbong pipe, discussing literature and their respective love lives:

“I’m glad I invented Mahfouz because I was able to then tell myself in beautiful brail that he
(who is me) who is happy must be ready to give himself up”
“That was purposefully sloppy, like the slipshod string of organization masterfully kicked out by T-Monk;
what a wise wit-creator, and a dictator of soul.”
“I’m glad I invented you because I’m able to now make sense of the nonsensical with little less introspective
scolding than a gesture towards sharp musical analysis
and the aesthetic comfort of hip harping-ons.”

The jazzy musician saw that his chimney chugging comrade devoted his life to not devoting his life from the way he released his nebulous words, and started on a subject that has explosive connotations

The slip bombthreat

love

“I fumbled around with Amal clumsily, putting together a slapdash medley of cool cadences, what came crashing down when I realized that this was a meticulous concerto and that I missed the memo.”
Several blank blinks later…
“What a sweet melody, Esperanza;
I only knew she existed while we made love, for those few explosive emotional seconds of climax
and orgasmic fury.”

The fault line rumbled and the two saw nothing more or less proper than to break out in a round of bare-knuckle boxing;
clenched fist slaps and flung flapping elbow swings smashing into each others faces,
grinding the tender inside of their red cheeks into the jagged-rock ivory of their piercing teeth.
Blood and pounded nerves calmed the two skin-wrapped souls while menacing smolders turned their world into rubble, pipes and stones, thyme, olive oil and twisted metal
dreams smattered against the gritty asphalt piles that the earthquake coughed into a flaccid chaos on the weeping soil.

Amal Esperanza woke up on the fault line and arose, patiently awaiting the next earthquake induced by the push of a button.

2006-03-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

The sunset is a makeshift revolt, where vacillating blotches of illuminated gold blood flood the sky. The Mediterranean blushes, because shame is a revolutionary sentiment and its luxurious fluidity should be free of charge. The clouds collide, but gentle exchange wisps quietly past the explosion; the system looks cushiony and welcoming until one receives it in a swift plunging dose where millions of freezing cloudwater particles slap your numb face and roll into the infinity being created quickly above you.

The tattered boy fell out of the sky, an earthsmack sending curling clouts of dust tufts into a frantic float. He stood up, bewildered, to stagger in Palestine. His mother had been expecting him, and she had started to worry.

Another school day in the Gaza strip.