BLACK. QUEER. AFRICAN AMERICAN.
I ask myself how would it feel to escape my body? How would it feel to vanish off the face of the earth?. Bloody soil on ground where I lay dreaming of shadows shapeshifting into familiar beings.
Breath is no longer available to body. Obsession with Black sacrifice becomes manic episodes and the feeling of myself engulfed in flames takes over my body. The world never wanted me alive in the first place.
How does one escape out of a chokehold? How does one alleviate pain? What does the body need? And how our body reacts to knowing the world doesn’t want us to survive?
I imagine the body being a gateway, a portal, a blessing- a body with purpose- with a soul and with flesh and with blood and sweat and tears. I imagine so I see into the otherworld- I see into existence- I am manifestation of all the bodies/ flesh that comes before me — and I would imagine life after endings. When we leave- we leave behind traces of memories.
I don’t remember who I am. the not knowing scares me.
reimagine the world- like a form of time travel. Enter. this is the beginning- never the end. exit.
I walked home to my apartment on 160th and st nick. I dreamt you was in my life; you being here by memory and all the beautiful things I remember about you — — the body know in the somatics — ; and I made it home today —
dreams as elusive — they, you — — this time and place — —
as i walk to my apartment on 160th and st nick — my body is tired, and hungry — and I think about how many of my Black folk ain’t here — so ive been feeling things, like back bends in hot yoga — and i felt things like when I be inside of you. — feeling your flesh with my flesh.
The practice of breathe, noise, sound, love and life.
I know — the body knows. The body remembers — the body knows when to take flight.
bones crackin and then i was born into and bought me back — and here I am like I travel from the future to leave myself gifts. the written word to myself- an ode to my life.
1– collapse into sky while raindrops fall into bare naked skin, on toes and fingertips and on tops of crowns. The universe we walk came crashing down and we hold onto and cling to groundings, to earth and the ancestors. A release, a moment of bliss and a belonging.
2 — we met on crossroads right off the train track. near golden highways and we walked miles. our bodies migrating between realms- of what is real and what is not.
When the body wants to make noise — and echos through the winds — that is your ancestors speaking to you. — and they be coming- in and out of your flesh. A memory, a gesture, a forgetting — a love letter, a recipe — they say “here are the ways to survive”
What is survival? What does survival look like for my Black Queer body — i remember the first time you fully made me feel seen — we sat there and you kissed me. I felt urgency. I felt alive.
We made noise with our flesh for the first time — and found comfort in intimacy. Two Black Queer boys coming to age — growing into becoming men- and even through you were my first. The residue that still remains.
I always wake up in so much grief for my ancestor (cousin Michael) and reminded that you was bought to me as my first boyfriend who was also named Michael. I’m honored to have experienced that.
Text for Michael
I don’t remember how young I was but when you died I felt a rumble in my body. and I was overcome with sadness. An emptiness that I would never get a chance to fully know you.
Waking up in night sweats. — as I live in my 30’s I ask myself if I would the same fate. I’ve mistaken death and love many times before but not like this.
We would often travel across the rushing waters, and I felt the heavy of your skin when you pressed your body against mine. Under the midnight glow we embraced each other.
This childhood memory creeps itself into my mind of times when I was abandoned to fend for myself. I would often dream of a world where my Black innocent body could fine space and freedom to exist in this world.
—
We spoke on the phone that night and you said “I’m bisexual and I like you” and I me being speechless said nothing. Mainly because I felt dizzy. Someone’s words shifting me and I finally replied “I’m flattered”
Love the enlightened flame engulfed by the very words you speak. After the first time we danced in the nude with our bones rattling, bones grinding into dusk to be scattered over crossroads I cornered you into becoming my boyfriend. Mainly because it was both our first time. — me feeing overwhelmed I wanted to wrap your being into my heart.
There was not much to say because I envisioned the day that someone would find me desirable. Being in high school and watching the boys around my age finding mates in the girls, overhearing their sex stories, watching them make flirt and sneaking off into back staircases, I felt a lot of shame in myself that no one wanted me and I would take it out on myself.
It was extremely cold that day. You took me to one of your favorite places near the water. “I dare you to kiss me…” he said. We kissed- I like to say it was magical but I remember never wanting to stop kissing you.
Maybe it was you who kept me alive, the high school love of my life who also happens to share the same name as my late cousin, who was also queer.
Residues- and holding onto things that no longer serve us in the moment but comes when you need it. Before this moment, I felt like I was nothing. So life often times did not matter.
Going through life for me to not understand my own queerness. My own Blackness. My own being.
I I would isolate myself in the bathroom to escape and would convince myself I was good enough. — This relationship to bathroom. The space it holds for solitude. It’s easy to wash away when your looking into the mirror while the water is pouring from the sink. — so when a panic attack would happen — the bathroom was a safe space for me. The sound of water running is calming for me.
To the lover in my life now who helps me to exist fully in this world. I’m not prefect- but you find it in your heart to love me- and to be patient.
I often find refuge in the flesh. In the responses of my fleshly body, in the wake, in the panic of it all. As I experience those sensed intense feelings there is also joy, happiness and love. there’s a deep knowing of what it means to take flight — - and in order to escape. we must gather all we need and parade forward — - we must gather our practices which is evolving in real time and learn from failure — — gather our tools to protect us from harm — — - gather our knowledge to open up gateways. — — we are resilient people.
The body has memories that are passed down from families, ancestors, ecology and construction of people. I try for myself to use that space to meditate, to find refuge in all the unknowns. I inform myself to see all that is not seen. To allow my body to sense with my flesh and to sense what is out of my control.
What is out of my control is the violence we have to attend to in the United States and how I’m always struggling with simple embodied actions such as breathing. Often becomes exhaustible. — - or find comforts in life.
In quest for sustaining myself I attempt to manifest ways of existing outside of violent ways of being. When I’m walking down the street and my body starts to feel danger. I am confused- are my feelings valid? It’s a response to watching the way our society is unfolding.
i attempt to give my body- myself permission to live, to breathe and to feel. Why did god make me Black and Queer?…
To be Black, Queer and American in this world it feels like an endless continuum of trauma filled experiences because there never much space for Black men to weep out in the open.
America tells me I don’t own my body. My body can be uprooted by acts of public ritual violence. — How often times Black people are subjected to violence in public space. —
Lynching for example —
This is why Black folk don’t get respect in public spaces — or for me never feel safe — an invisible wire tightly around my throat.
Even in Queer spaces there is a disconnect — how even in queer spaces there is forms of anti-blackness.
I don’t feel safe in this world.
I had dreams of me choking, gasping for air. Rceaching my fingers in my mouth to pull of the parts of you that was there. The parts of you that were pure evil. The part of you that keeps me trapped.
Arriving in Italy Being interrogated by white officials. Held captive in an office for hours. Being asked different questions from the white people in line before me being told that Africa is a poor country.
I have linked memories of my grandfather going missing the south. One day he just went missing never to be found again.
after fighting many years in War World 2 like most men, come back defeated. broken, fucked up.
it was said that the police sheriff shot him and disposed of the body. I long for my grandfather. a man I’ve never got a chance to Know him. A history erased.
I would tell myself this nightmare will eventually come to an end. I will be able to find peace.
And if our feelings
Fall victim to the nights
Remember the day
When the moon gave us
The innocence of not knowing
For reality turned
Into nightmares and
Dreaming was our
Only escape
To when we wake
We only tear
Each other
A part
And you tell me
“Meet me at midnight
Where our dreams will
Hold our hearts at first regard.
.
Never to wake again
I love you.
( Black breathe / Black noise and how collectively there are many aesthetics around Blackness, performance and narratives around a collective liberation. )
“Air is an object held in common, an object that we come to know through a collective participation within it as it enters and exits flesh. The process by which we participate in this common object, with this common admixture, not only must be thought about but must be consumed and expelled through repetition in order to think. The always more than double gesture of inhalation and exhalation is a matter of grave concern given the overwhelming presence of air as shared object, the overwhelming presence of breathing as shared, common performance. In each movement of dilation is a displacement of one kind of matter in the space and plane of another. To fill lungs with air is to displace the carbonate matter that was previously within. To write narratives of flight is to displace the common conceptions of the human, the subject, the object. Blackpentecostalism, I argue, is grounded in this process of movement and displacement, movement as displacement. Of material, of flesh, of concepts. So we turn to instances of breathing as an intentionally aesthetic production, a mode of life, a politics of avoidance.” — Ashon Crawley —
“Breathing. There is something that occurs in these texts that typically goes unremarked, or if remarked, is only done insofar as there is a spectacular instance of such. What goes unremarked, though certainly produced in the occasions of recounting movement, is the necessity of the breath, of breathing itself, as performative act, as performative gesture. What goes unremarked is how breathing air is constitutive for flight, for movement, for performance. We do hear about air, breath, and breathing in an indirect way when we read of the varied forms of punishment that were utilized to inhibit or obstruct air from getting into and out of the flesh. We hear, for example, of “heart-rending shrieks,” so much so that it would seem to be a narrative strategy and rhetorical device. Almost. The various stories, however, are not nearly contained to predetermined strategies. These narratives depend upon the repetition of the idea of how insidious and unvirtuous, how violative and violent, this peculiar institution was. ”— Ashon Crawley
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
“I can’t breathe”
Every time I see police I get flashbacks to the video of Eric Garner screaming, his last breathes “I can’t breathe” eleven times. The policing of Black men and how they are not afraid to kill us — Eric Garner was killed over cigarettes. Our bodies don’t mean nothing —
I believe these events cause trauma for me — shatters my spirits — reminds me I’m a Black man and could take more life if I make one wrong move.
Every time I’m stopped by a police office I’m afraid I’m going to lose my life — in situations of being harassed
This below is dedicated to Eric Garner —
my people sung the gospel
to the beat of drums
shower the street with
sunflower kisses
mountains of amethyst crystal
clear waters,
beauty kisses the floor
you walk upon.
Awaken with you never
Being here.
Our people drink
from these waters.
Our people are
The water.
Sing a song
Snap your fingers
Ride the motions
With clarity
As if your life
Depends on it.
I felt you moving
In the skies and
Under my feet
Like an earthquake
Missing kinfolk
Like they snatch your
Body off this earth.
(writings in response to score with Marcus and Rigo) jan 21
Like DNA becoming one the breathing into the flesh and creating space between seen unseen breath to reach otherwise places that are not imaginable in reality swinging and wading in the waters the rocking of the boat sail off to uncharted waters rocking in the pelvic floor windows being a gateway to transform to transform spaces entrance in time for flesh for flesh blood for blood rhythmic build stomping on the feet softening the grass clearing the grass follow the impulses of the body take breaks to make sure body resonates with life break a moment for ancestors how do we care for the descendants what do the descendants to hold onto each other my people saying they cost for and spoke in tongues are honored to the dead the molecules pulled by tide flattening the grass the labor warriors can dance my mother she has this weird relationship the water when will let us go survival and pleasure internal external skeleton.
We are indeed a collective growing body. Living all on the same matrix. But within different dimensions.
You breathe together eventually all will become one. One collective body.
What does the collective body look like?
Who cares for the collective body?
How do you care for the collective body?
The first time I understand what the communal body was capable of was the first time
keep asking myself are we kinfolk.
For blood spills
Up and down the body.
Veins
Blood pumping
Through the hearts
Viens remind me of roots.
Being grounded
In my roots
we collectively build.
One must swim in the waters before he shouts —
Kinfolk, like midnight. I remember things. Like waves in the ocean — here we drank from the waters.
Momma once told me the waters hold all the information.
I’ve been here before.
We rekindled in passing always in my mind at a funeral.
Here we pay honor to all lost and dead — here we come to celebrate.
To stomp and shout for the dead -
Why do us kinfolk
Have to die before
pass down
the hidden secrets to life.
An African American Experience
The Black and Brown bodies hung
Twisted necks, eyes bulging out of sockets
And the sun burning their souls blacker.
The Smell of death lingered
In the air as the living
Lived on.
Watching their own mothers
Fathers, sisters and brothers
Become livestock.
Black doesn’t matter to the
human species.
He or she who’s not rightfully laid
To rest, only rises stronger.
“Here is the medicine —
That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and often is, that every person we hold dear is taken from us. Still. From moment to moment, we watch our beans and our watermelons grow. We plant. We hoe. We harvest. We share with neighbors. If a young anthropologist appears with two hams and gives us one, we look forward to enjoying it.
Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go.
Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.”
September 25th, 2019 —
A 1st grader on the playground confessed to me her grandmother died and she felt scared and to comfort here I told her the story of when my grandma died. You maybe hurting now but things will get better.— and I felt for this young girl. I walked her to the office after school counselor on duty.
About 35 mins later the counselor sends her back and in my head I’m thinking we don’t hold much space for Black children to collect themselves from such trauma and pushed back into the world.
My grandmother — my whole family called her Big Ma. She was an important figure in my life because she was the first person to ever see me and encouraged many possibilities for life —
She survived — coming from Richmond Virginia to Harlem — and she was the first person to see me.
don’t you realize
we walk amongst
the dead?
The conjour of circumstance
Lives that are unkept and forgotten.
Lost in the interm of bodies
Being thrown off ships
And into the ocean.
In the isolated world.
I could somehow feel you speaking
To me in your or my bones.
Coming to me
In visions.
A sea of nightingale
Flying over
Uncharted land and I would
Wake to you know
Longer being here
On this earth.
I am privileged to use text to process dismantle systems. I attempt to counteract the violence placed on my existence. — - while saying that I don’t intend on educating anyone with my Black experience. Rather offer an invitation to mediate on the endless possibilities for life.
I don’t know where my people come from; inside of me lives shame of not knowing — - or become engulfed in America’s retelling of my people’s stories. Of being enslaved people but how do I use the knowledge from the past to ascend into the future. I know we are from American by way of Virginia and North Carolina- however I always ponder on the The Great Migration and how my people traveled north. What were they searching for? Or trying to escape?
I stand on borrowed land with borrowed people who don’t know the ways. I don’t know the ways or how I gotten here. So I can only imagine. Of how my parents met in Brooklyn, New York. Of my Grandmother making her way from Virginia to Harlem. Of when I was bought into this world — -
I used to believe of utopia as safety. That is only fantasy. I will die only to live on by memory — - I will become an ancestor who travels to a otherworld.
We ride death to the other world. The ancestors we never get to see but we sense them in our bones. We feel them.
What about your dreams?
I do not dream.
I do not tell him about the dream that terrifies me every night.
I do not dream.
— — —
I felt this loud noise of something shattering on the hard floor there between Him and I.
— — —
I come from milk and honey
Watermelon and fried chicken
Breaking out of
Bondages to the
Sounds of clapping hands
Flapping feet in the waters
Kissing the trunks of trees
Stars guiding the way home — -
Walking miles to times travel to
The space we made home.
— — —
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus.
The disease causes respiratory illness (like the flu) with symptoms such as a cough, fever, and in more severe cases, difficulty breathing. You can protect yourself by washing your hands frequently, avoiding touching your face, and avoiding close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people who are unwell.
covid 19 (April 1 2020)
a declaration to myself to stay alive and that this is capitalism’s way of saying you shouldn’t be allowed breathe- and flesh. this is the world response, or rather an outside force telling us we shouldn’t be able to gather, and fellowship and to make noise, and to function.
i hope that I wake tomorrow with life and with breathe. this disease won’t take me out-
They say salt heals. Salt water, tears, sweat. So I practice to allow my self to relax and enjoy bittersweet taste on my tounges. — ode to malcolm — I try to find space for play, for weeping, and the toxicity of the world to sweat out of my pores.
like salt waters your ancestors swim across — Stolen bodies; bodies who died in the rushing waters but here is where I land.
sweat in the sun like when sharecroppers harvesting the lands you manifest when I have to mental seeds for harvest. — of being able to process Black life.
and to cry coming to understanding of allowing for the soft edges. — that I am human — and tears ain’t painful.
Water flows down the backs
Of the people of the land
Our bodies are made of water.
Healing comes in forms of touch
Hands placed on the heart
It’s not like before
He’s sad.
It’s not like before
Another era
Another vibe
I dreamt of you in my dreams
Ringing noise I quite
Didn’t understand.
Who wants to understand a verbal language anyway. Let me see your body contort to the sounds of utterance transmitting from the body — as the body shifts into another dimension.
How do you reimagine self?
Technologies used to escape reality
How do you transcend?
I dreamt of lifeless bodies hanging — swinging from side to side under the moonlight.
My peoples know how to fly — the wings be on our backs — flight be with us all — and we going to be flying home soon.
I wonder about the life I don’t get to experience or how to be fully comfortable in my body because America robs me of that. And as I sit here, jittery, speaking in low utterance to stop nerves from playing onto the surface. I ask myself Am I crazy? I try to control my body and the spasms. I try to control the failures and the panic attacks. I try to reclaim my mental health.
I remember the smell in the hospital like it was yesterday- like a sterilize- a space that was holding up of my time but also an escape from the world and being heavy medicated life was surreal. The feeling one gets when life indeed feels dreamlike. I remember feeling empty.
Hospitals are weird for me. after the deaths of my grandmother, uncle and an accident that happened with my oldest sister. / — the hospital is not a place of safety because it comes with such shattering news and this is when I realized death — - my family slowly one by one leaving this earth was a trigger for me.
It’s this unspoken rule that you can’t be Black and have mental illness. This is the reason I’m afraid to reach out for help or the disregard for my Black body. Black folk always had to create their own tools and devices. So everyday I wake in order to try to heal myself. Holding on what I need to survive and letting go of what no longer serves me. I allow myself to become attached To breathe, life and come to the realization I have to let it go.
To reflect on memories that haunt us like night terrors being locked between white walls in a hospital with the hope of one day being set free to exist in the normative world- “are you ready to go home?” Was always the prompted question. Although I felt somewhat like a lab rat I wonder what is home? Silence has always been my home.
Silence between us
Heaven above take us into
Your arms
Time to meet your maker.
Trigger Warning: REFLECTIONS ON ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
The razor blade reminded me of barbershop, desire of death and the male body. The power of something dangerous, that could literally slice open flesh. The removal of hair follicles. The talks that should have happen in the barber’s seat but fear of my femininity being exposed so I would quickly alienate myself. — I would hold my head down and sink deeper into the chair. So I was able to close my eyes to maneuver the razor.
I sat in the tub and slid the razor across my wrist because I didn’t Have much to live for. Deep down inside I wanted to finally feel something that was as painful- the feeling of being missed- of not having to exist.
Seeing red blood dripping into the water felt calming. My dna infusing, flowing with the water and back onto my skin. I drained out the water of the tub saying goodbye to the parts of me spiraling down the drain. Kissing my new open wounds. Wrapped my arm up as if nothing happened and went to bed.
I was a Sophomore in high school
I told the school counselor “I cut my wrist”.
next I’m being
wheeled off into an ambulance.
I begged her not to call the police.
But she said did anyway because it was the department of education’s protocol.
I spent a couple of weeks inside the psychiatric at mount sauni with other teenagers around my age. I would spend most of my days in my room — away from everyone. I was still trying to process everything happening. I was mourning — for the world, for myself, for life and for flesh.
My family sat across from me and I tried to utter out the words of how I was feeling and I couldn’t. The awkward silence that happens when your family looks at you as if you can’t be Black with mental illness. “It’s just a phase…. It’s just a phase.” My family will never understand.
I wake everyday as an offering — as radical act — as living flesh — walking on earth, on land — I try to stay present.
Memories twisting
hurricanes death
wants me beneath him.
Over and over again I read generic emails from a number of physiologist — and this one experience from the ER.
You can’t be Black and have mental illness. As my family sat there across from me I couldn’t explain why I cut my flesh —
Connections between myself and people — place — time — space — complex individuals we are — we come with systems that every second is being rewired to fit how we are living in the present moment. — connections between people and the world — connections between collective gatherings and transformational experience. — thinking about this, I’m making room for otherwise possibility to happen. — or unseen come to life. — to live in the imaginative. — to make sense of the sensible. — and also the non-sensible.
sensible ;
- (of a statement or course of action) chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence; likely to be of benefit.
- (of an object) practical and functional rather than decorative.
- capable of feeling or perceiving, as organs or parts of the body.
non-sensible ;
1 Philosophy. Not accessible to investigation by the senses; inapprehensible.
2 Unintelligible; not reasonable or judicious; nonsensical.
Trying to formulate language in response to words I can’t express. That’s why I gravitate towards embodied practices. It’s something about dance, movement — it’s accessible — it involves the flesh, matter, investigation.
