#smallplans

Played Small Plans with New Urban Arts peeps yesterday. Rochelle won reckoning, dance, redemption, fulfillment, and embrace. She offered me reckoning.

Real Nights

Played Small Plans with fellow artist mentors at New Urban Arts yesterday morning [Saturday 1/30/16]. Jason won Round 1, but didn’t have time for an offering. Brandi won Round 2 and offered me sight. Amato won round three and offered me spirits. Here are some poems that came out of the morning.

It never ends.

Hang them all on the wall. You’ve got a feeling. And so you lay your self down. Your stomach sinks. You heard once that counting to 1,000 could stop that. Someone enters the kitchen speaking a language you don’t understand. You try to pick out your favorite letters from their sentences. They’ve been your favorite letters since you were four. You once tried to drown them in the sea but they turned green. Or was it red?

Third Eye

A meaty dark like eggplant or a midnight Godzilla or an eddy in the Atlantic. I remember being alone and loving it or knowing it was okay to fall apart sometimes and not get out of bed. Tomorrow is Sunday. Every day is filled with the potential of alphabets.

For Ezili

Dear Drake,

Small plans have made clear that spirits, God, abyss, chaos, and daydreams reveal grace, sights, music, hope, and correspondence.

Dear Drake,

I think I’ve said this before, but I write to you in public because the fact that we will never really know each other keeps our communication, or my communication, my desire and need to correspond, in the safe space of daydreams.

As a child I would dream during the day, so much, too much, spending hours imagining my way through wished plots and hoped situations that had varying chances of becoming reality: none at all to highly likely.

When I was eight years old I daydreamed that Soul for Real would perform at my First Communion. I was to wear a gleaming white dress, with accompanying head piece and gloves, as the lead singer/youngest brother serenaded me with “Candy-coated raindrops.”

Maybe because I watched so much television or maybe because I was so committed to being a well-behaved child or maybe because I have always known the power that my given circumstances would have over me, my daydreams were often simultaneously unreal and pragmatic, like the most boring and pedestrian delusions, like dreaming at 5pm of Jesus Christ washing a car.

“In the dream, in magic, in schizophrenia we return to the dual unity, mother and child, as one body.”

Norman O. Brown has a lot to say about dreams in Love’s Body. When I read the word schizophrenia, I think of James Baldwin’s conversation with Audre Lorde in Essence Magazine in 1984. He says:

“One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic, and I mean ‘schizophrenic’ in the most literal sense. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white.”

I spent whole summers watching television every day, from the moment I woke each morning to when I slept at night. I spent weeks on end following stories and plot lines of people who did not resemble me or anyone in my family.

I was invested.

I daydreamed about ways those stories could become mine. But my pragmatism gently nudged my brain into making revisions that, though still full of the fluidity of dreams, were always grounded like the carpeted floor I sat on until I was nine.

I still daydream now, perhaps more than ever. I call myself a playwright as an excuse to make it acceptable. I write down my daydreams, name their characters, record their locations. I play whole things out. I organize casts to play the whole thing out. I let my daydreams go. I let someone else own them so that I do not get too lost in my reverie for fear that I might get too close to my mother’s body.

Some unions do not make for greater, more abundant life.

Some unions bring you closer to death.  

There is hope. We try to hope.

I once tallied up the totals and learned that my hope is filled with loss, death, pain, limbs, eyes, Sustacal, a thermos, toothpaste, pills, a dining room table, a leather jacket, cologne, pink gums, subway trains, songs, smiles, flowers, and sunlight. Maybe there was more.

I double check. That still feels right.

I think of all of these things swimming in the turbulence of a whirlpool of Chaos as Antonio Benítez-Rojo describes in The Repeating Island:

“a discontinuous conjunction… clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification.”

I never learned how to swim.

I think hurricanes make for excellent dramatic structures.

I have told more than one person that I am a hurricane.

I see my dramatic structure and keep trying to write my own play.

“What is the shape of your play” is a question I like to ask other playwrights. It’s a way of asking “What is the shape of you?” I’m not that interested in plays. I’m interested in you.

Are you you when you wake up most mornings?

I am me when I step out of bed and immediately make it. I smooth the sheets and fluff the pillows. No one watches or congratulates. I’ve been doing this since I was seven, perhaps even before that.

Seven is my favorite number. I was born in July. I was seven in the second grade when I started writing letters. I used to exchange letters with my teacher, Miss Connelly, in my class journal. The fact that my correspondence was always met with a reply and that reply was connected to my competency and success as a student (a person learning, retaining, and reciting knowledge) has framed the way I communicate with people. It therefore frames how I see myself. My self is, in large part, a series of correspondences that, through the appropriate amounts of exchange and assessment, have reached a certain level of reality.  

Meleka Mokgosi has a painting called Pax Kaffraria, Full Belly II in which a group of black girls stand with everything but their legs in white socks and mary janes blacked out.

In that same conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, Lorde says:

“Even worse than the nightmare is the blank. And Black women are the blank.”

I keep corresponding. I wonder—I know. I know I am trying to crawl out of the blank. I am filling the blank with words that might clothe my spirit. I keep trying to be real (for what reason, in a world like this one, I’m not so sure these days; but, you know, I have a body and that will always have to be enough because that will always be all there is.).

There is God. In the possibility of my body there is God. In the audacity of my body there is God. In the insistence of daydreams that mourn fallen bodies there is God.

Each fallen body reminds me of the second occurrence of the abyss, as Glissant names, in Poetics of Relation,

“the depths of the sea. Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains.”

And so this throw becomes the beginning and I think of what that must have sounded like:

a heave, a splash, a clunk,

silence.

What strange music.

What strange songs could I sing?

When I was fourteen I used to daydream that I would become a world famous R&B singer/songwriter. I don’t know how to sing. I can’t hold a note. I’m pretty sure I’m tone deaf. I have no singing voice. I don’t even like singing. But I daydreamed about it a lot. I imagined performing on stages and at the Grammys. I imagined music videos, duets, and remixes.

I used to write songs. I used to write the songs for these daydreams. Pragmatically speaking, if you’re going to imagine yourself as an award winning singer/songwriter, you better have some hits. You better have a debut album.

I remember these lyrics from one of the songs I wrote:

Dear Drake,

Where is

hope redemption justice music dance—

what else…

salvation (definitely salvation) peace sight possibility happiness—

mmm…

generosity embrace art (like some good ass, bomb ass art)?

Dear Drake,

Maybe