chocolate city

Porque tus amores perros me van a matar

sin haberme dado la felicidad...

Break away from neon-lights quicksand

‘cause you are not alonnnnnne sonnnnnnnn...

Like the low-light-warmth: smooth, peaceful, good.

A little room, away from the buzz. The crowd looks in, listens, fades.

All away, quiet, cool, all away with nothing beyond.

Wrapped up in the unfolding—what was anxious isn’t; what gave pain doesn’t. 

“I like what you do”; a whisper.

Stay with love

Stay like it’s the only thing

like a firefly under the yellow moon

the muted, curved horizon, broken with

steeples and echoes and windy dark off the high rooftop perch,

down to the tight embrace

sweat and beauty

stay:

trapped by touch,

trapped with love.

Break free but know

you’re in this shit alone.

You know that right?

yeahhhhhboy...

give me your money

And a rapist known as freedom.

free doom

Tangled up deep, I never had my head like this. “Conventional,” she tells me eating breakfast, coffee and eggs, at the edge of the third ghetto. And I’m at the edge of all craziness, ready to launch into the wide nothingness of a life path conceived in the thousand-year grind of steel gears unfathomable, my one soul rising high from the crushed dust of allsouls, crushed after a past we made up when we whispered to each other late at night. Launching towards some triumph of will and intellect where the “words are things” rulebook dictates movement on a slice-dice time rhythm. And I’m dying.

I think what attracts me is how fucked up it all is. The currents of malaise just gentle enough to keep afloat, pointed downstream, conscious, they push; they strip the movement of meaning, a spectacular exposure of the humdrum wild, the prison of white lights. A thousand tangled homes standing tall under sunset pandemonium, a thousand cars driving pulsing stereos by the dude strutting slow, diagonal across the street. I want her to disrespect me and I want to be so mad about it I can’t think.

All I have is ambition and I want more. 

fly high

Dreams of living life like rappers do...

Just trust the world, trust love. Except the world is fucking killing you. How can you say that everything's gonna be ok, when it never turns out ok for anyone?

Fell in love with this chick, drunk-frat-boy-crowd bar on a Saturday night, Saint Paddy's day, too, so you know they were blitzed, but I wasn't so drunk. I was studying before, reading, mind all anxious, wound up and tangled, starved. She swooped me out the coffee shop, drunk-green-gargoyle night with the lames--it's a language I don't speak, that frat language, but we grab the jukebox and she leans on me. And we pick songs and we dance. Nobody dancing but me and her and it's beautiful. Gargoyle dudes all looking, and the most beautiful girl just wants to dance.

And I think the worst kind of loneliness is being lonely when you're with someone. When you're around people, talking to people, connecting to people, and they can't speak to what you're speaking. It's that deep loneliness, and you can't party your way out of it, or smile your way out of it, or even fuck your way out of it. But sometimes a girl can lean on you at a jukebox, and pick a song, and make you believe for a second that these cracker-jack snapshots that are supposed to add up to a life might actually get their weight up, might actually be worth cashing in at the end of it, that the constant becoming might move, that what we shall be, has not-yet-appeared, that we can lean on some fiery truth in this world and trust in its goodness.

But I think my heart is too big, and too closed, so that when it opens it feeds on everything and dies on nothing. I think my heart is too fucked up. And what it wants might not be real, might be corrupted. Dark nights and high hills, master-plans and fairytales. Dreams of a ghetto kingdom, dreams of acceptance from the universe. But I think the universe might hate me.

 

Rock n roll visions before sunrise

and even the saints can't save you

lights in lima, lights in my mind

but if I got a condo on a cloud

then I guess you could stay at my place

I'mma get one...

Dude called me breakneck crazy 'cause I'm choking on air in spin-town, New Mexico.

And I can't raise my eyes to look around.

The streets fly by, city lights-ugly, crazy mountains and clouds, cumbia blare

blurs to everything, blurs to nothing,

blurs

because I love you.

man said, broke-down crazy: driving through neon desert paradise; "And tell her,"

someone said.

The light-up buzz at dark, dusty festivity, everyone too loving, and "pretty lights,"

someone points.

and I see them, and I don't care.

And she's nowhere:

The wild, frenzied absence of nowhere, dirty nowhere, windy streets, robot-people going nowhere, people staring-off, with no music, no beat: cold boring wind, ugly boring library, long boring papers, bitter boring coffee, nowhere, and the fucking lights...

            gas pedal drops, car leaps out, and some sappy, contrived shit

bumps out the radio, and I'd rather be here than anywhere, except it hurts:

            how can I tell you when all I can say is that giants are fighting above my head, fighting in the bright stars, and rumbling loud across the wide, dry horizon? That the weight of absence is too heavy and too light, a smothering desolation? How can I tell you I'm alone when I'm surrounded? How can I tell you when you don't care?

Love is a stupid thing to write on.

man was like,

crazy.

And I can't raise my eyes.

And I love you. 

cayo hueso

I wish music could adopt me...

that one night 

when I felt free

like that shit means something,

like that shit counts

freedom in the potential:

angst but more. radical hopes but more.

some kind of fleeting wind

the fleetingness itself:

gave her a quick kiss

on a bleary club night, dingy, defeated, neon pink, fake plants, "kitchy,"

she says.

alive in the wild dreariness of crumbled ambitions

tacky suits and drunken dance steps

tapping out clave raythms

with the crew; at the table; passing a bottle of rum, tacky comedy, 

blaring over a

fashion-show-blur.

then out into the night

crowds and yellow lights blended into the purple darkness 

the wall holding back the massive sea.

free

stumbling over a gasping city

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.