Photo credit: Jayanthi Kyle, painting by Emel Sherzad

Asphalt Sky (rewritten and edited Dec. 10th 2016)

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 nature’s domain and what is own-able. 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 access, keeping us from reaching our connections and 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’s 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 it’s own reality, as it becomes itself on canvas in life and in 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, 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, 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," Billie 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 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 values that made us ashamed of history, that have made people who perpetrated history ashamed of the roles their ancestors played in it. Unless those roles are acknowledged 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 it 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 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.