Category: music

Loose & shooing under a high-top of language

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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

Sweet freedom’s song

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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

AG2024_1134126a or an unseen work within was plying

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AG2024_1134126a

Blue Note. Donald Byrd’s 1973 live recording release in 2022.

We take from life one little share,
And say that this shall be
A space, redeemed from toil and care,
From tears and sadness free.

And, haply, Death unstrings his bow,
And Sorrow stands apart,
And, for a little while, we know
The sunshine of the heart.

Existence seems a summer eve,
Warm, soft, and full of peace;
Our free, unfettered feelings give
The soul its full release.

A moment, then, it takes the power
To call up thoughts that throw
Around that charmed and hallowed hour,
This life’s divinest glow.

But Time, though viewlessly it flies,
And slowly, will not stay;
Alike, through clear and clouded skies,
It cleaves its silent way.

Alike the bitter cup of grief,
Alike the draught of bliss,
Its progress leaves but moment brief
For baffled lips to kiss.

The sparkling draught is dried away,
The hour of rest is gone,
And urgent voices, round us, say,
“Ho, lingerer, hasten on!”

And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,
A moment’s rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?

No; while the sun shone kindly o’er us,
And flowers bloomed round our feet, —
While many a bud of joy before us
Unclosed its petals sweet, —

An unseen work within was plying;
Like honey-seeking bee,
From flower to flower, unwearied, flying,
Laboured one faculty, —

Thoughtful for Winter’s future sorrow,
Its gloom and scarcity;
Prescient to-day of want to-morrow,
Toiled quiet Memory.

’Tis she that from each transient pleasure
Extracts a lasting good;
’Tis she that finds, in summer, treasure
To serve for winter’s food.

And when Youth’s summer day is vanished,
And Age brings winter’s stress,
Her stores, with hoarded sweets replenished,
Life’s evening hours will bless.

Winter Stores, Charlotte Brontë