Riot

After all the lights and screams
nothing but my dreams matter
2pac


"Agency" is the buzzword of history in the twenty-first century. People love agency. Agency means that people act to change the course of their own lives, that people act to change the course of events, that people can change the world. Agency rejects the Grand Inquisitor, freedom, bread, give us both! Agency means liberty, power, despair, struggle.

Agency means the world is yours; the future hangs in the balance. Structure can come down, but agency will flow up.

The city is in flames.

What is agency? Did rising food prices snatch the rug from beneath Cairo's simmering calm? Or was it a man's singular action, gasoline, a match, pyrotechnic suicide, screams and destruction, breaking open the night?

The urban malaise: invisible guidelines, invisible bonds, society...together. Because urban dreams can be dangerous, or they can be nothing. Windows down, stereo up: drive on through. But the true agent knows: push on the structures, or push on nothing. Stone walls are hard, no matter who controls the fist.

Could be wings are an affliction
-lee

There may be no sickness greater than an unencumbered ego. Humility: nothing less than freedom. Stay humble, stay hungry. But don't feed off of bare ambition.

Trust.

Glancing Through the Shadows.

Blastin holes in the night till she bled sunshine...
-Mos Def

Look at the city: what you always knew, street corners sparkling, buildings gaping, crumbling, murmuring something about a past that wasn't; a past that wanted to be. Your life is here, and the life you want. Their life is here: the curbside mob. Dirt, trash, faded glory; look. Life washes against the city

And look at the people. People you can't even see, people as platitudes: heroin addicts, dealers, hustlers, students, cops, old, young, broke, rich, speeding by; the city flies. People who could be those things and aren't, and how would you know?

Your imagination knows.

Think about what makes your heart beat: the thin line between order and chaos, mine and yours, sense and nonsense. A man: hooded sweatshirt, sees the siren, ducks to look at a menu, retreats--looks but doesn't check the price.

The city watches, sees, remembers. It lashes out.
The nexus
between this world and the next,
boredom:
bright lights at dusk,
between the tracks of squealing tires.

A to the K

You've seen/ a magistrate inflict visible punishment./ Now see the invisible.
-Rumi

New thoughts circulate and satisfy. Is it possible this dreary place is everything I needed?

I remember rapping Cypress Hill lyrics in fourth grade. The "Crazy white-boy" naive; brought me to a new place, had me in a new mindframe: of knowing Bed-Stuy years before I used to get banana smoothies on Bedford Ave, C-train up top, record shop down low, sirens loud, sidewalk crowded, wanderers wandering, stepping to a steady beat.

A tourist-trap for me. Authentic culture gave me a feel for the rhythm but it was a rhythm rooted in Webster elementary, no P.S. attached. But then reality has a funny way of matching itself to the ideal. Ideas (tick-tock) have a way of keeping it real.

So many realities and so many ideas. They flash in front of me:
A shanty-town girl warning me not to go to the club because someone might drug me and steal my organs, she not sharing my confidence that my body was my own.

A soot-faced beggar, enraged, hitting his mouth,gesturing hunger,eyes wide, ferocious, ready to steal, to kill, ready to drag me into his universe, even as police dragged him from mine.

And fighting off a beggar in the dark streets of a city, me yelling his death, frightening even myself, his world close enough to touch.

Sleeping with the roaches in Mejico, a house for everyone and no one.

A dirty young girl on the subway. I knew her so well; but I didn't know the wide-eyed ferment, disorientation, vertigo-stare, her look; and her infant daughter slung across her hip; her smile, my smile, and yet a gulf between us.

What is this world? Have I stumbled across reality? The memory of pain is fleeting; writing about pain verges on the romantic. If we learn to feel are we forced into the deadly present?

Ideas trickle down as images float up.
I want to float too.
Or stand tall and paint a picture: look.
stand tall and scream:
listen.

Trapped in the Sun

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by its own burning.
-lee

The tendency to freeze: time aside, forgotten,
but still marching, beyond the wind,
redolent of then: some time that did stop;
or maybe it only stops now.

The tires screech, burn towards the drooping red sun.
Pulsing bass, pulsing beat,
screeching laugh with a steely stare, frozen movement.
I see it, head nodding.
I take it in, red sun blinding.

I write: does the wind taste like death?
I read: life is in the rhythm, between the beats.

Descent

Fuck who's the baddest
A person's status depends on salary...

Thinking:
How to live more, how to spin and laugh with joy,
how to scream at the night, to terrify the darkness with the eye's gleam;
how to touch, to love, without fear of the rising dusk, the muted lights, and dim curtains,
the dripping shadow.
how to feel when fatigue washes the world away, the active malaise, active inactivity, loneliness: the apathy,
The magic of longing.
How to study a world in which few tread,
those tiptoeing past the slumbering horde.

Thinking:
bondage for the free.

Evening Hustle

and one lifts my heart
into the weighing pan opposite hunger...

Peace and war. Am I asking too much? Childhood dreams, youthful ambitions, the bridge from then to now to something great, feeding the forward inertia: to the day when the streets are mine, when the prize has been won, when the dusk keeps itself dimming towards perpetual thrill, lighted glory; when every bright window's secret is known.

Floating beneath my dreams
I crave the firm ground

to fly again