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.

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.