the loom of leisure

Obviously, you can’t choose what matters to you if you don’t know who you are, if you are a composite person, made up of social cliches and borrowed opinions. Nothing will feel real because it’s not yours. You borrowed it. Nothing will have any value because it’s not deeply felt. Strangely, people who are composite and who have never thought or felt deeply in any authentic way, are permanently angry. Their endless rage convinces them that they do believe in something, are feeling something. But it’s not true. Noise hides emptiness.

Lester Young played tenor sax in the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1930s. In a moment when most players favored heavier, aggressive sounds, he intentionally played unhurried, mellow, almost behind the beat. He was also the first person on record to use the expression “I’m cool” as a state of mind; I’m keeping it together. “Cool jazz,” the genre named after his style and popularized by Miles Davis, actually came a decade later.

we gorge ourselves on love not thinking about tomorrow/there’s never enough time/to make you full/never enough flesh to fill your skin/we open our mouths for stories/for sun-tinted histories and swallow each other whole/here in this place with no room for mercy diaspora secrets, we enclose in pregnant pauses/write on the walls of unwanted wombs/invisible-ink poems in the margins of bodies/living out a map of a place called No Homeland

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

you got to forgive yourself for hurting. you got to remember that your heart is not a clenched fist your heart is not a bruised face your heart is a mango full to bursting with sunlight oh sticky heart, smooth substance, there is joy in your aching, refuse to surrender the memory of your flavour. delicious heart, refuse to forget. boy, you got to love the girl in the boy in the girl in the boy in you in you in you.

i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist