About the Skein I’m In

“It all depends on the skin you’re living in.”

Sekou Sundiata

A Family of One

Sometimes when we’re together I don’t feel like a family of one. One of us starts a repetitive phrase for momentum, and the other will pick up pitch, tune and rhythm to meet the other somewhere in a chord. Themes in our rotations lead us to rendezvous’, sometimes in the house of Reily other times in houses without walls: houses not made by hands, dwellings without foundations, ceilings. The particulars in our narratives surrender to essential touchstones that burn with kinship.

I’m disappointed, I confess because she said “I only treat friends and family” and I asked, “Which am I?” ‘Friend,” she whispered. My mind appreciated right away how friendships are hard earned and family is really not a choice, we were still in the “not a choice” phase when we met and assumed we knew why. Something is growing beneath her forearm strokes, her cranial palming with a breathy, “let your head be heavy,” and I imagine but do not say, and let your burden be light. “We are a family” I inserted, “a family of one” who are inseparable from all that lives around us, and endless ancestors who gave up their ghosts so we might acknowledge our relation to each other.

Remember a Sloth

Everything prepared me to be alone. I was raised an only child and left alone to invent myself and make up entertainment. Loneliness was a difficult companion until I found permission and acceptance better company than judgment. Eventually I learned to appreciate two quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, “If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company” and “hell is other people.” Bob Kaufman confessed his “Solitudes (were) Crowded With Loneliness.” To escape to solitude is so different from being left alone, ether way once you get it you’ve got it and it often becomes the blues. Blues in all its shades are my favorite colors, “all shades all hues, all blues.”

In an essay titled The Creative Process James Baldwin was eloquent on the subject of solitude and “the artist.” “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that (they) must actively cultivate that state which most, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.” And later in the same essay, “The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearless aloneness that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control.” I found true love in solitude because the love I find there is unconditional. “All I want,” sang Melody Gardot, “is somebody to love me like I do.”

These days I sit ruminating on my next creation, rehearsing phrases that will part the whiteness on pages, give voice to silence on my lips and reflecting on yeserdays as if I’ll need to make a script. It’s the being alone part that leads to “too much time on my hands,” and “you’re thinking too much about it.”” I don’t care if I don’t do nothing, just while my time away,” as Taj Mahal put it. All levels of perception bombard me so I’m sometimes too paralyzed to write and record what I’m living until I force myself to slow my roll to a virtual crawl. I became this way to stop a stutter that often made me incomprehensible to all but my inner circle and those patients enough to wait me out.

There’s always something to not do. This world is full of flailing and unnecessary motion, too frantic, to soon, too fast, too much. We do have choices and we aren’t trapped inside our “one world family,” we’re liberated by it. We are not alone. We are gathered inside like candies in a piñata waiting for epiphany while suffering misdirection, dysfunction and mendacity. Though different from each other and xenophobic we are inseparable; we don’t recognize ourselves yet we are we.

I became a sloth to learn to relax; I became an actor to portray myself in life as I channeled characters on stage. I am writing me into existence while learning to slow my mind so I can speck without a stutter. I slowed down enough to hear myself think in single lines rather than in jumbled paragraphs, and to rehearse enough to stop tripping over my own two feet. It wasn’t until I heard improvisational music that I realized how my mind works and how to take advantage of methods of deep listening. Bass solos teach me to think about what I wouldn’t normally take time to ruminate on or what fell through cracks of daily business. Horns are for levitation above ground, pianos for taking fights to elsewhere and drums are the “A Train” back home.

Elsewhere

Not everybody thinks listening to Monk, Coltrane, David Murray, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Sun Ra is relaxing; I’ve slept, made love and read complicated literature by their rambling, whaling and precision because I’ve found home in their free expression. All ends point out a different trajectory toward somewhere else in the universe, somewhere else in time. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for until I couldn’t find it or I didn’t recognize what stared me in my brown eyes. I still don’t know, after all this time where I came from or where I belong, but Kahil El’Zabar expresses my longing and confusion.

Because of that music and Black Arts I found a paradigm to practice some roads by which to escape my enslaved reality. I heard a description of me in a Rahsaan Roland Kirk song, ”I've never seen him at an airport before, I know he moves along the piers he calls himself a journey agent a Eulipion says his friends the poets and the artists, the musicians are Eulipions too, listen to his tune he calls it his duty free gift for the traveller”

The Nature of Prayers

I leave a wormhole of solitude to venture into other vocabularies then return to my own body of language searching for sense and making metaphors.

Sometimes I leave things as guests left them to remember their visit, so I can turn and see them still here, still with me. My body holds on to every touch until they touch, kiss, and hold me again. A black cup on a flower-covered saucer still holding used red berry tea flakes, a silver turtle jewel box and a blue jewel dairy waiting for keepsakes and words, a vase of yellow flowers now merely a ghost ship of fallen stars, brillent pieces of art everywhere, sometimes-purple burses, aromas and music of voices singing when no audio device is on. These things are meaning and evidence of something familiar. A family of one; this one.    

I can tell she knows I like her too well, and I have to keep my loud secret respectfully and honestly. There are infinite worlds out here and none of us can hold even one in our hands, we try to control reality and it slips between our fingers each second we flex to grip. After we met I felt, if she had a religion I would join, I’m irrational, I’m smitten with hot hands that move my flesh as if it were hers. Everything goes but anything doesn’t, infatuations are deeply rooted in insecurity and no one knows exactly what it is. She’s changed me and I’m still me, I pray the influence is mutual, the ambition of prayers is one sends them into somewhere they’re hoping answers live.

I return to my wormhole to sort my harvest into something more than flashbacks and noise. My open hole isn’t empty; it’s filled with memory and memorabilia; a hard mud-cloth egg for a worry stone and massage rock, bean bag animals for mascots, montage words of wisdom, chocolates and miles and miles of scarfs that wrap around me even when I’m not wearing them. Home is where evidence of generosity is and snail trails of enduring amorous linger in air like fragrance of essential oil. In my solitude they haunt me like angels and friendly ghosts pushing me to run on ‘see what the end gon be,’ couching me through frustration, depression and pain. Many days I feel black blue and Palestinian but, ‘I ain’t gon let nobody turn me round.’

This huge collage of people, items and songs is the NuSkein I’m living in. This journey toward light leads through a loving family of one, this one world family has housed me, fed me and treated me like a man even when I didn’t deserve it or want to be treated that way. But, “I could wake up in the morning without a warning and my world could change. Blink your eyes, blink your eyes, it all depends on the skin you’re living in.”

Is Always Be

Imamu Amiri Baraka taught, “Is always be,” I’ve interpreted it many ways because I’ve had time to contemplate what it means and why it resonates. “The changing same,” sometimes depresses me but mostly there’s assurance that I’m not the first to face struggles for freedom and self-determination in worlds fenced off from each other with barbed wire. Change like the Mississippi River can be managed and dammed for only a while before the inevitable reaches back to reclaim compromised banks and floods appropriated land again. Ice is melting and fresh water seeks salt water because it must, all the while improvising something different from what flowed down stream before. We’re like that; flooding land we use to know while carrying new organisms to a sea.

I used to think of her as water rushing 
on her way to some wet function, salt water, a composted organism. Then I reckoned her spirit as air – free and meandering, I’ve yet to see her rooted anywhere. Her roots reach upside down for sky and particles of cosmic funk, she is acrylic music making way without drying – dancing stories without ink. Phoning from inside wind to tell me she’s blowing in it; I rest between gypsy paragraphs waiting for my cue. I gasp before sucking whatever is available, exploiting a sense of urgency like time running on a clock with only a second hand and daily issues running too - like out like rhythm.

I’m learning to love without habit, to see without judgment and to listen without needing to agree or understand. I have not made a cuckold of my art for women, for fatherhood, religion, political causes or dope. I have ridden every rollercoaster in search of truth, humanity and the wisdom of what it means to be alive and authentic on Earth. My skein: this loosely wound head of dreadlocks is on the edge of making something that doesn’t yet exist or understand itself. The symbiosis of how loose geese form a V is and will remain inside information, outsiders refer to it as mystery or discount it as a hoax.

This morning something like “getting religion,” feeling the Holy Ghost or a trip on LSD captured my unconscious mind and wrapped me inside a wondrous cocoon of spiritual transformation. I was led corner turn by corner turn through a labyrinth of community love and protection by a community I only have an osmosis relationship with, a mix tribe of Mexicans and indigenous Americans. The ritual surrounding my experience made it feel safe and appropriate so that I wasn’t afraid or even concerned about myself. I’m not delusional and I wasn’t under the influence of any substance that would cause me to hallucinate, except I’m devoted to my creative work and where it leads me. Some ghosts in American air found my soul worthy of visitation and occupation and are using me as a way to channel something I don’t understand yet. It’s not the first time. I’m open to ghosts and I welcome their influences.

It’s impossible to pinpoint one particular cause for my heightened dream experience and I can’t rule out any potential cause so I’m simply telling the story as I can recall it today. Last night I went on a radio program at KFAI-FM and found myself in good company, including the ghosts of Gato Barbieri who had made his transition two days before, and Dollar Brand, a.k.a. Abdullah Ibrahim were featured artists on the program. The music as Emel, the program host said, “raised bumps on my arms.” I admit to recent nights when I didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted because of pain but I got in a nap that day. Nothing really extraordinary happened because this is normal practice for me: listening to incredible music by both living and ancestor musicians and reading ghosts note from my bookshelves. I’m settling on a cumulative effect from a lifetime of searching and receiving such correspondence as these.

When I was able to shake off my tiresome and befuddling sleep I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed uttering a phrase I had heard so often in my childhood. This phrase expressed what I portend to understand now, a molting into a new being, a “changed man.” Confessions like this were never simply spoken they were almost always sang in a particular cadence as to amplify the unusualness of the epiphany. As I sat there I literally “looked at my hands and they looked new, I looked at my feet and they did too.” Not to limit this to a religious cliché I also heard a Taj Mahal celebration of transition into or onto a higher plane, “I had the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown but now I feeling so much better I could cake wake into town.”

Asphalt Sky

The dominant color is black; white and yellow are infused in the middle and complicate the complexion of a sky hiding shadows. Space is still the place, but now it's covered with asphalt because it's been conquered as territory as real estate, like some place that can be owned.

Another lie sold to the general public about what is real and what is ownable. The Internet and cyberspace have been so divvied up that you can't walk across without stepping on somebody's property, and when you step on somebody's feet, somebody's piece of sky you pay a toll. Ozone  potholes require frequent sky construction stopping traffic blocking traffic keeping us from reaching our connections and popular destinations.

I got a new way of being, I can't be like I was, can't be like I wanna be, can't be like anything that has ever represented me. That's gotten me in trouble, I have to change my way of living, have to change my way of thinking about what I do and who I am. I have to listen to ancestors asking for favors.

I don't know when I found out I'm inappropriate and out of bounds almost everywhere and almost all the time, but it's the color of my personality. It's who I'm supposed to be, a person with chances to embellish life on Earth by pushing boundaries. I feel the pain of a deep rough massage every day, it's not what I say or write that is a problem its how it's  heard, it's how it's read, it's how it's perceived.

I'm responsible for how I express myself not how people interpret that. I'm expressionistic and everything has meaning whether others dig it or  don't. I'm telling truth! When I'm censored and denied free expression my expression becomes protest. My personality becomes distant and more abstract.

Like an abstract sky, like an asphalt sky making its own reality as it becomes itself on canvas in life and the imagination of every viewer. We don't believe we can make it up so we continue to live between lines and are afraid to paint outside of lines because we trust lines and we don't trust our imagination.

The worlds we live in were created by our collective imagination and we might be able to imagine a world better than this one. We are afraid that if we tinker with this world too much we will break it and actually the world is unbreakable that way.

In fact the world is already broken it was broken when we decided we could own each other, we could own land, when we decided we could own air spaces, sky and everything in it. By now it doesn't matter who started it: wars have killed and maimed and left everybody injured and suffering from post traumatic stress. Humankind is merely a means to an end and the end is always capital wealth and growth of the gross international profit.

Love is for sale in the asphalt sky like it is on the asphalt ground. So is everything else for sale in the asphalt sky because selling something is what makes this world work. You don't, I don't know what love is but we keep perpetrating it as something that's oppressive, something  like a prison, something that keeps us running all the time trying to catch something that won't slow down. The dollar is always ahead of us always will be, that's the way it was designed. Trying to catch a dollar is like trying to catch your breath; as soon as you get it you breathe it out again and it's gone.

So what's that got to do with love? "Who wants love," Billy Holiday asked and it's a good question in the context of how we got this way, who we are and why we chase dollars. "I'll go away without it," Lady Day contends, "I know too much about it." We tend to lose our sense for both love and money and when the two entangle we forget principles, and values we've cultivated until then. Mankwe Ndosi sings a song, which starts with her scatting a wordless melody, when she finds words they're requesting of her "baby," "don't you give me no diamond rings," she repeats the phase several times interjecting, "diamond rings cost too much time, time for those who mine, time for those who kill, time for those who die, time you spend away from me." They cost too many lives, put too many men in danger, she infers. Mankwe expresses her priority over the materialism associated with love and diamonds with the last line of the song, "baby don't you give me no diamond rings, just come over here and rub my feet."

Making obvious connections like that seem rare in our considerations of the connections between diamonds and roses and credit cards and cars as manifestations of love. We don't know what love is so we think we can make it into anything we want it to be and sure enough we do. If love is anything then love is nothing because we need to decide, we need to affirm, we need to explore, search and seek out what love means in ways that do not conform to the principles of a patriarchal society. Love is not capitalism and certainly capitalism is not love so how do we separate those things. How do we better understanding what it means to appreciate a another human being beyond objectification.

Which brings us back to an asphalt sky; as we continue to build new frontiers, as we always will because it's our nature to do so, we may imagine different values that will make our lives more sustainable and humane. We need not carry forward values that made us ashamed of history, that have made people who perpetrated history ashamed of the roles their ancestors played. Unless those roles are acknowledge and atoned for they will continue to haunt and betray us. Hidden lies about how we arrived here and denial about whose responsible only digs us deeper into what is already a bottomless abyss of mendacious, myths and faux pas. Adding perspectives from all immigrants (voluntary and involuntary,) is essential to know our story and to make us whole. Without those narratives we can never know completely who we are and our silent identity is our schizophrenic problem.

As we bleed into each other culturally more and more each day it only makes sense that we acknowledge our relationship to each other as kinfolk rather then as enemies. To hate self in the other is practicing self loathing in ways that make us crazy. Professionals tell us that crazy is not a psychological diagnoses but we know what crazy is, it's all around us all the time and whether or not professionals acknowledge craziness it's something we need to deal with. In the words of Amiri Baraka,

"Craziness is no

    Act

        Not to

                Act

      is craziness"

Our acts need to be collaborated, we can't continue making decisions without "the other anymore." The other is an illusion,  until we acknowledge that we are walking backwards in our own footprints.

My Neighbor Across the Road

The road between us is one less traveled, with grass growing between cracks in the asphalt and deep neglected water ruts. It is a road with an incline reaching higher and beyond to some place through darkness tunneling toward light. Whatever we believe is divine is at a fictitious cul-de-sac of a never-ending avenue in a space that is neither rural nor urban, suburban nor wild. What it is we cannot say though we lie about it almost daily and dream of it every night. It’s not a destination but we long to rest there in a place cleft for us as if it were a stone: a permanent rock of ages where we may hide for eternity.

As long as we have something to believe we can justify all the hell we endure on Earth. Some of us fanaticize about a benevolent father figure who waits to call us his own like before when we had nothing ourselves to worry about. A cool cloudy cline that saves us from the real hell beneath where we could work, sweat and suffer for eternity. What else is happening while we wait for butter to melt and ice to freeze? The world goes on though we are busy doing mundane business or we’re just hanging out with ourselves; contemplating what this thing is, called life? We read its music with our eyes closed.

No wonder we find ourselves as characters in a rambling rigmarole, sometimes spreading us thinner than we want, detained from footprints we intended to leave. Instead we linger in melancholia accompanied by a deep cultural malaise, sucking in like too much gut; holding on like cats slipping from a ledge. All this keeps us from appointed rounds of meditation on meaning and devotion to truth and abstract news. We stop to catch our breath along the way because walking often feels like swimming and endurance is no longer our strong suit of clothing.

Which brings me to my neighbor across the road, a larger divide than I realized; maybe a gulf would describe it better and render more truth. Across the road from me is the mystery of her life except a few precious detail gathered from her stories, family recollections and eves dropping at a memorial. Time takes on a retrospective dimension when I think of her in my present tense of grasping for straws and wishing I’d initiated more conversations. I’m clear about what happens on my side of the road from day to day, some things like awkward walking, constant pain and the aggravation of losing control and needing relief from being overwhelmed by paper and bureaucracy. Had I known she was leaving soon I might have shared what I was doing across the road: listening to Nina Simone sing Ne Me Quitte Pas in impeccable French while reading the English translation. We might have constructed a bridge across our narrow road and repaired gaps and cracks in the asphalt between us.

We often pine for pillow shaped clouds with silver linings, rivers like Jordan and envy the “lucky ol’ Sun,” that rolls around heaven all day, when we’re alone across the road from each other. Talking about such things can sometimes take them off our heart and fly them across a room harmlessly. “Ne me quitte pas,” I might have said, your smile lights up the hallway. I could have asked: Do you know, "If You Go Away" is an adaptation of a 1959 Jacques Brelsong "Ne Me Quitte Pas" with English lyrics by Rod McKuen. In English I could read from a translation,

“We’ve often seen

The fire erupt again

From the extinct volcano

That was thought too old

There are, it seems,

Scorched lands

Yielding more wheat

Than the best April

And when the evening comes,

The sky is ablaze,

Don’t the black and the red

Blend together

Don't leave me

Don't leave me

Don't leave me

Ne me quitte pas.”

But of course now is too late, I’ve missed her everyday, I hope her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter don’t grow tired of my investigation and curiosity. The sky was purple the night she was found and that was a perfect shade of blue.

It’s sad to realize that mathematics became limited to an exercise in subtraction and improvisations on themes of what one can do without. We arrive to greet mornings without good reasons to get up except to urinate and then to face the day without Brenda, Rose, Zuzie, Thomas and Bena Jean, for they have already made their transitions to another realm. George is hanging on by the hair of his chinni-chin-chin and you can’t bear to go see him for fear you might crawl into bed with him and beg him not to go away, too. “Ne me quitte pas,” you would whisper to him as you have to all the people, talents and skills that went away. You said that to a stride that announced your confidence way before your voice was audible. You’re now minus pain free days and plus restless nights for more time than you care to calculate; you don’t remember what it’s like to feel good anymore. You lie when people ask how you’re doing because telling truth has become far too complicated to bore them with in passing. 

“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” asked the book of Jeremiah. Apparently the physicians had all gone to Egypt for the embalmment of the dead. What an apt metaphor of our time and a poor reason we keep losing the ones we love to incompetent medical care and a profit system that does better without old people who drain the coffers. Me and my neighbor across the road would be better with a balm, the resinous gums of Gilead, than prescriptions designed to bilk and entrap the public on a bridge that leads to nowhere.