Category: music

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are loved of more and less;
Thou makest faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem’d,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated and for true things deem’d.
How many lambs night the stern wolf betray,
If like a lamb he could his looks translate!
How many gazers mightst thou lead away,
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!
    But do not so; I love thee in such sort
    As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness; (Sonnet 96), William Shakespeare

But there never was a black male hysteria
Breaking & entering wearing glee & sadness
And the light grazing my teeth with my lighter
To the night with the flame like a blade cutting
Me slack along the corridors with doors of offices
Orifices vomiting tears & fire with my two tongues
Loose & shooing under a high-top of language
In a layer of mischief so traumatized trauma
Delighted me beneath the tremendous
Stupendous horrendous undiscovered stars
Burning where I didn’t know how to live
My friends were all the wounded people
The black girls who held their own hands
Even the white boys who grew into assassins 

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [But there never was a black male hysteria], Terrance Hayes

Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, 020925

This wasn’t a display of Black trauma for the white gaze—Lamar’s disassembled flag was a visual tailored toward the contemporary Black gaze. An aspect of déjà vu weighs down these expressions of Black resistance, trapped in the box of the camera frame. Consider the performance a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. One segment of the audience is appalled, another is amused, another is politically invigorated

Doreen St. Félix in New Yorker

Let Negroes smell the breeze
So they can sing with ease
     Sweet freedom’s song;
Let justice reign supreme,
Let men be what they seem
Break up that lyncher’s screen,
     Lay down all wrong.

The Negro’s “America”, Frank Barbour Coffin

if we stand together there is nothing that we cannot accomplish bottom line let us go forward and fight for a government and an economy that works for all not just a few we simply

Bernie Sanders, 013125