Bud Light

Alternative Title: Reverse Bastard Examines the Genetic Nature of Alcohol Use

You were not there when I needed you the most
There is so much more to say or to ask.

In asking, I approach you:
What is the bond between father and son?

The bond between father and son
The space between the chip and the shoulder it is placed on.

The chip, placed on the shoulder
The world placed on Atlas' back.

Bent back I shouldered your absence
A fire blooming in my spine.

In my spine, that fire bloomed
I hobble on blackened feet.

On blackened feet. I walk through this world darkly
Dad, do you walk through this world darkly?

Dodging slivers of glass
Hidden among grass blades.

Hidden among the grasses' blades
Always drawn -- safety the gasps between shuddered breaths.

Drawing breath I shudder as air fills my gut with rot

The fermented smell of blades of grass-sheathed-glass.

That fermented smell, that first Bud Light
I saw you drink and saw you smile for the first time.

How could you not?

You drink and smile for the first time in days. 

Budding light, that brilliant friend
Lifts the chip off of your shoulder.

And I follow behind you, your chip and your  promise
Blades of grass glinting off of brilliant friends.

Who know you more than I ever could
Dad, the first time I drank it was because I wanted to get to know you.

Blackness (Consent not to be a Single Being)

Alternative Title: Reverse Bastard Reads Too Much Theory With Their Morning Coffee

after Fred Moten,

To participate in Blackness is not a negation of the Other
But an embracing of the consent to not be a single being
To exist in the gap of what I am believed to be vs what I am
All those emergent variables reconfiguring themselves along multidimensional planes
To become the nexus and the model

The cause and its effect containing multitudes
Which in themselves become multitudes
Which in themselves are bounded and reshaped by the
Shifting trajectory of revised timelines

Blackness, the embodied guardianship of repressed histories
Blackness, crystallized and historical memory

My dark pulse counting the metronome between
life and afterlife
ancestor and descendant
colony, post-colony, post-racial, re-racialized, bound and repurposed
Entombed and incarcerated preemptively within the body
That harbors that freedom dream which anchors
And dissuades from colonial rage

Embodied and immanent, time forced into the present
By the eruption of my ruptured patience and measured hope
Watchtower, I am watchtower
My ticking hands pulling the thread of eternal recurrence
That reminds the soul of the shift between essence and instance

Being dismembered and whole across transverse planes
Phatasmic limbs gesticulate spatial reason
Reveling in the erotics of fragmentation
Raging in the celibacy of putting myself back together

Being within and without
I stand beside myself
Blackstar singularity
Instantiated, analyte, pitch-black blur
Essentialized, phalanx, golden horde