The evening air is filled with the beautiful song of greasy gray and black British Starlings, Prince Crickets and whispering whiffs of flesh and bone over open fires, occasionally disrupted by ragged broken barter code, disintegrating paper heralding a bleak, but thankfully incoherent state of the ghetto address and rattling metallic thump-buzz-hum of cheap loud over powered sub woofers in the trunk of some multi hued tribute to urban ingenuity.So much with so little for so longThe only way we know to change it is leave and pretend that we never lived there.Technologies kill godsTrauma resurrects themGood times remind us of where we come from andThere was a pickle jar fill with olive oil and cheap weed in the east window of his flat. It had sat there for ten days steeping like sun tea. When people would ask, I'd snicker under my breath and he would throw the inquisitor my copy of some new age, pseudo-scientific how to journal with "Were the Great Prophets Weed Heads?" in big yellow letters on the cover."See Nig", one might begin, "I told you not to ask questions like that when you was high and shit". Passing the magazine around until it reached me. "I already read it, Man" opening it up to the centerfold and displaying the picture of a half naked white woman bathing in a pool of marijuana. "Gimmie dat Nig". Flipping through the pages in search for more pictures of weed and women, before tossing the book aside.She hung bright white sheets on the plastic covered rope that stretched across the yard, sat on a green pillow that sat on top of Sunday's newspaper, picked up a sweating glass of lemonade and pressed it to her skin, raised the thin flower print cotton shift over her knees, leaned against the wooden frame of the blue green screen door and silently prayed for a cool salty breeze to roll in with fog. She thought that she wasn't one of those people that longed for summer, it meant being away from work trying to find something to do with the money she earned sifting through dot patterns on a massive computer screen."You remember this" the silver haired man pointed a stick at a roughly scratched image in the barren soil, "three points of reference to accurately plot a destination". The sandy brown haired girl stood on her left foot, her suspended just inches above the space where the marks of her movements and her shadow made the ground look dark, fertile and rich, undistributed by the shh clink clank of the horseshoes flying over the space that had once held a house, the shouts of boys and men or from the old man's gentle voice behind her right shoulder or the bright white cloud that moved differently from the other clouds. She slowly lifted her right leg near her extended arm pivoted her body toward his voice, "And the shortest distance between two points is an arc." When her eye caught the stick that her grandfather held at his side like a shepherd's staff, she let her extended leg follow like a snapped rubber band and exhaled a sharp yell that echoed off brick facades, turned heads towards her and sent birds in near by trees scattering to the wind. Touched the old man's staff lightly with the ball of her foot, then pushed through and quickly withdrew it, leaving a even circle gouged in the dirt beneath her left. "And..." her grandfather asked. "And there are no long straight lines in nature". She took on deep breath let it go and waited standing on the balls of her feet, left before right, hands loosely hanging from thin brown arms, eyes on her grandfather's hands, in a most deceptively relaxed pose. "Go play girl". He smiled wide. She gestured her hands chest high right before left, stepped forward and reached out to touch his left hand with her right. "Can we walk to the ice cream shop Poppa. I don't want any, I just want to walk with you". He slide his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. "Sure you don't want any ice cream girl?". She stared at the ground thinking a second and replied, "No, Sir. It's not as good as what we make and I'm waiting for the strawberries"."See Bro' here's the problem, we don't have a system of measurement for things like this, but just 'cause we can't measure it doesn't mean that it's not real, but dig". He drew a triangle on the concrete stoop with a piece of broken brick, "Okay, this point is time. Time covers a lot of stuff in the world. A long time ago people measured things like the span of time between full moons, the sun reaching the highest point and the lowest point in the sky. It dictated how far they could travel, but then things changed the air grew cold and didn't warm up, the waters pulled away from the land, the animals that taught them what was good to eat and the animals they hunted moved away and the fruit and vegetables they ate stopped returning. So they followed them, counting their steps, so that they could explain the distance to others". He marked another point on the triangle. "This point is distance, distance and time equal speed. Now we've got an absolute language for an abstract concept and something to begin refining, because we can start applying this to a lot of things. Next comes economics. The idea that there's enough for me or there's enough for everybody. And he marks the third point of the triangle".'Okay!' She thinks, 'I know that at so many degrees above absolute zero, this element begins to stop obeying the laws a physics that I understand. They start climbing over the edge of beakers, flowing through the bottom of tubes, altering the path of light around it's own field, seeming to be in multiple places at the same time and everywhere all at once. I can dig that, but how did Louis Armstrong influence Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Rakim Allah ripped a path of silence through a looping rhythm track like sunrise over a curving horizon. She thought, she'd never seen sunrise over a curving horizon. The realization moved through her like a dissonant chord. She could hear his voice laugh her words, bouncing off the walls as he walked out the back door to stand on the fire escape. "I just like the beat, I don't listen to the words so that shit don't affect me. The song is Chinatown My Chinatown".
Very complicated, fertile language, that lays down soil anything can grow in. I experience your writing as an infection that has its own way with my thoughts once inside the barriers we erect to keep meaning at bay.
You, Ulysses, create memes for good rather than for evil.
https://theblacklist.net/
Comments
You, Ulysses, create memes for good rather than for evil.
Ray
I want an agenda for others to be suspicious of, conjecture and theorize.
It just seems like a great way to earn passive income