Microculture: Knot

Comb your fingers
Through the threads
Of your history
Pull the fibers apart
Of every knot within
Look inside
The stitches of memory:

Recall every moment when
Instead of being a heart-shaped box
You chose to be a garden tool

Recall every moment when
Instead of being loved
You chose to be useful

Trying to gain unconditional love
With conditional behavior

Microculture: Dysphoria

1. What comes first?

A. The right place?
B.The right time?
C. The right body?

2. How many times can you keep lifting weights until the weight of feeling like your body is too heavy to lift subsides?

A. 3 months ago?
B. By New Years?
C. In another lifetime?

3. If, by your choice, you could create a t-shirt of encouraging phrases friends and family offer you -- what would it say?

A. Keep up the good work!
B. You seem like you have a lot more energy lately!
C. 3 months ago, you were the smallest you've ever been.

To be a body is to be:

A. A mirror
B. A marble
C. Both
D. Everything, all at once.

Microculture: Ritual

Once again
You in bed
Covered in sheets as
Pale as the face of the moon
Choked in cold light
Arms wrapped so tight around your chest
That your hands can almost hold each other
Behind your back
Like a snake coiled so tight
With its own tail in its mouth
To form a seal rich with magic
For this nightly ritual

What are you holding in?
Who are you keeping out?

Microculture: Washing Dishes

How can you not
Enjoy the thought
Of something once dirty
Being made clean
And put in its right place
Again and again

---Redemption

Microculture: Bald

I remember scrolling through
Old profile pictures of me
With you
Before I knew you
Before my hair was long

Upon seeing me with a bald, shaved head

You said
"I think I prefer your hair grown out"

So I kept it that way
It seemed like a small price to pay for love

When you left

I kept growing my hair out for another 9 months
Thinking I could entwine some strand of time
From the timeline in which you preferred me
Locked in the coils of my hair

So imagine my scalp's breath of fresh air
When I shaved it all off
Watched those tendrils of black drop like clouds of ash onto the kitchen floor
Like a timeline crumbling away to the honesty of a razor
And I looked in the mirror

And

For the first time in a long time
Felt as if I could be beautiful
Without your approval

Microculture: Run

The best part
About going for a run
Is that moment when you finish
And you walk so you can cooldown
And you're listening to Mogwai, or Television, or Patti Smith
And you can see the pinkness of the sky
Bruise into purple before going black
Like the closing of a cosmic eye
And no one is fucking with you
And you think about what
You are going to eat when you get home
After you get out of the shower
And you think about six months ago
When he left you
To go cradle someone else
In his arms
And you think about how then
That was all you needed
But then you snap back to reality
And realize that everything you needed
Is cradled in the vault of the sky
Cradled in the arc of your headphones
Cradles in your slowing stride
As you walk to a place
You know you belong

This Black Body Pt. 3

"For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.  It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved and unassailable and monumental dignity.  You come from a long line of poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.  One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." -- James Baldwin, My Dungeon Shook


There are times when this body feels like a curse
Like a funeral shroud draped in shadow
Over bones bleached with the fear of being laid to rest too soon.
A doom inherited and passed down from generation to generation.
Gifted to us from a colonial dream.
As migrant ships cut black bodies off from the blood of their tribes.
No Yoruba, Kikuyu, or Ashanti to sustain them.
No Ogun, Mulungu, or Asase to shape their dreams with myth or origin.
Cut off from the source, love amputated from their veins
Chained by the weight of a history frozen in time
A static block sticking them in the back someone else's words
Sticking them so far in the back of someone else's history
Giving way to a tradition of men unable to love their sons
Taught not to love their sons
Lessons learned on trading ships and auction blocks
A cycle of diaspora passed down to a son by his father

Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from a colonist
Who inherited it from an auctioneer
Who inherited it from a ship captain
Who inherited it from a king

That constructed an economy
To mint my bones into currency
And weave my skin into a curse
This is how the black body is commodified
Itemized and systemized
To become a machine of labor
Designed to build a country and bear its history

But I am no machine
I am a black body that lives and breathes
Sparked by a flame that resides in my soul
To thaw myself out of this frozen history
And dispel the curse that has stuck me in time

Here I stand
With my two black hands
Raised up in personal rebellion
To swear an oath
To deconstruct my past
And shape my own future