And in being and embracing
All aspects of the mother:
Patience, responsibility,
Compassion, open-heartedness
They will find themselves
Provided for, they will find
Their dreams fulfilled, they
Will find their spirits nurtured,
And their hearts healed
Wind washed wonderful
Whirlwinds through water
Welcome to the New World
Where words wind and shadow
Whither and whistle worship
The weather call to the clouds
Walk through the winter
A week of new sounds
We wish for clear water
It’s a wonder her wing-fruit
Seeds smile like my daughter
Whether she will or
Whether she won’t
The wind will still whistle
Through thistles and thorns
Son of the Sun
Friend of the wind
Life of the womb
Reborn once again
May the sun shine through
Your clouded testament
Silent angel
Wingless words
Women who dance
Meaning into shapes
Shapes that are symbols
Of truths to come
The past tense of drum
Is dream
We dance through
Memories, unseen
We are dancing women
The subconscious
Of our ancestors
The contents of feathers
And webs, rewoven
The fabric of a future
Once fable
The legend
Of a legion
Of angels
The only metaphor that
Exists is midwifery
All else is sight specific
Most things are
Hardly more than they are
There is midwifery in poetry
Midwifery in dance
The artistic process is
A process of midwifery
If we do not catch
These falling stars
Then we will experience
No more than a cratered
Wilderness but when truth
And beauty falls into our hands
And we learn how to place it back
Into the arms of the mother …
You finish the thought
The depths of breath
Is all that is left
To breathe shallow
Is to wallow in doubt
Here on the darkened wood
Of this misshapen tree
There is no trace of age
Its rings have been stained
And tarnished
There is no telling
Of ancestry or lineage
It no longer matters
We are here now
Conjurers of the evermore
I cannot invest in these surroundings
For only I am held accountable
And the wages of unwritten pages
Is shallow breath
It is only through this
That we might replant
These forests
Libraries are forests
Replanted….
That which I was born
I am no longer
That which I was born
I have lived well beyond
That which I was born
Yet I am
As an artist
First, I was black.
I wrote with a yearning
To be a leader. I was
Born into a mourning
Race. We mourned
The death of a king.
I awoke to find
My tongue a scepter.
2001
Inner breathlessness, outer restlessness
By the time I caught up to freedom I was out of breath
Grandma asked me what I’m running for
I guess I’m out for the same thing the sun is sunning for
What mothers birth their young’uns for
And some say Jesus’ coming for
For all I know the earth is spinning slow
Sun’s at half-mast ’cause masses ain’t aglow
On bended knee, prostrate before an altered tree
I’ve made the forest suit me
Tables and chairs
Papers and prayers
Matter vs. spirit
A metal ladder
A wooden cross
A plastic bottle of water
A mandala encased in glass
A spirit encased in flesh
Sound from shaped hollows
The thickest of mucus released from heightened passion
A man that cries in his sleep
A truth that has gone out of fashion
A mode of expression
A paint-splattered wall
A carton of cigarettes
A bouquet of corpses
A dying forest
A nurtured garden
A privatized prison
A candle with a broken wick
A puddle that reflects the sun
A piece of paper with my name on it
I’m surrounded
I surrender
All
All that I am I have been
All I have been has been a long time coming
I am becoming all that I am
The spittle that surrounds the mouthpiece of the flute
Unheard, yet felt
A gathered wetness
A quiet moisture
Sound trapped in a bubble
Released into wind
Wind fellows and land merchants
We are history’s detergent
Water soluble, light particles,
Articles of cleansing breath
Articles amending death
These words are not tools of communication
They are shards of metal
Dropped from eight-story windows
They are waterfalls and gas leaks
Aged thoughts rolled in tobacco leaf
The tools of a trade
Barbers barred, barred of barters
Catch phrases and misunderstandings
But they are not what I feel when I am alone
Surrounded by everything and nothing
And there isn’t a word or phrase to be caught
A verse to be recited
A mantra to fill my being
In those moments
I am blankness, the contained center of an “O”
The pyramidic containment of an “A”
I stand in the middle of all that I have learned
All that I have memorized
All that I’ve known by heart
Unable to reach any of it
There is no sadness
There is no bliss
It is a forgotten memory
A memorable escape route
Only is found by not looking
There, in the spine of the dictionary
Words are worthless
They are a mere weight
Pressing against my thoughtlessness
But then, who else can speak of thoughtlessness
With such confidence
Who else has learned to sling these ancient ideas
Like dead rats held by their tails
So as not to infect this newly-oiled skin
I can think of nothing heavier than an airplane
I can think of no greater conglomerate of steel and metal
I can think of nothing less likely to fly
There are no wings more weighted
I too have felt heaviness
The stare of man guessing at my being
Yes I am homeless
A homeless man making offerings to the after-future
Sculpting rubber tree forests out of worn t
ires
and shoe soles
A nation unified in exhale
A cloud of smoke
A native pipe ceremony
All the gathered cigarette butts piled in heaps
Snow-covered mountains
Lipsticks smeared and shriveled
Offerings to an afterworld
Tattoo guns and plastic wrappers
Broken zippers and dead-eyed dolls
It’s all overwhelming me, oak and elming me
I have seeded a forest of myself
Little books from tall trees
It matters not what this paper be made of
Give me notebooks made of human flesh
Dried on steel hooks and nooses
Make uses of use, uses of us
It’s all overwhelming me, oak and elming me
I have seeded a forest of myself
Little books from tall trees
On bended knee
Prostrate before an altered tree
I’ve made the forest suit me
Tables and chairs
Papers and prayers
Matter vs. spirit
Yo, the mosh pit
Is star lit
I see the light
In your eyes
Find my way
To the amp
And stage dive
Into your lives
I am as ignorant
As I am heaven-sent
My mind’s a circus tent
I ride the elephant
Into the record store
Its foot breaks through the floor
I hear the surface pop
And underneath, the rock
Down in the underground
A more familiar sound
I do a somersault
Into a sonic vault
I’m in the listening booth
On a quest for truth
I nod my head and goof
I shake and move
Everything you see
Tilted to the sea
Everything you touch
Wilted more than once
Everything you know
Melted in the snow
You are all alone
You are all aglow
No one has to know
Future slave narrative
Comparative literature
Sketches of an undeveloped picture
Charcoal star soul
I Ching detected from a bar code
Download mad niggas by the carload
A brief history of timelessness borrowed
King of sorrow/ King pleasure
Buried treasure
Twelfth Night/ Measure for Measure
Paranoid Android
Listen at your leisure
Or beat it, Michael Jackson
Red leather
Disfigured nigga
Inbred communion
Remnants of a resurrected ruin
Pray with your eyes closed
Sleep with your door closed
We want to see those truths that you’re hiding
Bride in a white dress
Cried in her white dress
Salt-water moon daughter
Bled at her ritual
Communion
Same blood
Different visual
Digital ritual
Ritual digital
Binary star
Some cats in a car
Rollin on dubs
Do you know where your kids are?
Rollin with thugs
Drinkin that good shit
Smokin dem drugs
We got you tied up
Brain sleazed and fried up
Eyelids are pried up
You see what I see?
White mothafuckas tryin to be what I be
Black mothafuckas tryin to shop to feel free
I’m waiting to board an airplane in Atlanta when I spot Hype Williams. We greet each other and begin catching up. I ask him if he knows about the long list of songs that was sent to radio programmers, suggesting that those songs not be played. He was unaware. I tell him that no rap songs were on the list, primarily because the vast majority of mainstream rappers are not talking about anything of any political relevance, nothing that might counter the system in any way. In fact, rap radio feeds the economy. He tells me that the rap game is like fast food and that people will always want fast food. He asks me if I listen to hip-hop. I tell him that I study it, but that I cannot listen to it in most cases for the same reason I don’t eat meat: I don’t like how it feels in my system. I tell him that I can’t listen to it because it seems to betray the hip-hop that molded me. He wants to know if I remember Public Enemy, KRS, Rakim … I tell him that I have difficulty listening to contemporary hip-hop because I can’t forget.
“Maybe you should search reality and / stop wishing for beats and steady bass / and lyrics said in haste / if its meaning doesn’t manifest / put it to rest”
“POETRY” KRS-ONE 1987
Hype and I seem to symbolize different worlds with the same last name. He is in first class and I am in economy, in the back (keeping it real?). We are balancing the plane by sitting in our respective seats. Our respective films Slam and Belly came out the same October day three years ago. We are both playing our roles in doing what we feel we were put here to do. The pilot has just announced that we are at 10,000 feet and that the movie will be Cats & Dogs. Funny. This makes me think of the magazine cover I just read that says “DMX: Hip-hop’s Hardest Rapper.” DMX was the star of Belly. If I were to figure into the rap equation, I’d probably be the softest. To most dogs I’m probably a pussy. Back to Hype. Hype is not a rapper, yet I feel he has contributed greatly to what now is represented as hip-hop culture through the media. And I guess even more importantly, young black culture. The question I am posed, as an artist who is very much a critic of hip-hop and popular culture, is whether I am most comfortable preaching to the converted or, more accurately, what would I say if I had the opportunity to sit and talk with a Jay-Z, a DMX, or a rap entity who reaches the mainstream on a regular basis?
One might ask, well, who the fuck am I to criticize, especially when I’m on some poetry shit. Well, actually my love of poetry didn’t happen because I grew up reading poetry but because I grew up with very strong doses of hip-hop and that is the poetry that shaped me and molded me. Through hip-hop I gained my biggest appreciation of myself and my culture. Hip-hop made me proud to be black in ways that my parents could never do by forcing me to read a Langston Hughes poem. And even when I began writing poems in the mid-’90s, while everyone started going on and on about who was producing what (Dre’s beats, Premier’s hooks, etc.), I stepped into the poetry arena, which at the time was synonymous with the underground hip-hop scene, because it felt like lyricism was getting the short end of the stick. I wasn’t being fulfilled lyrically. Thus, the poetry that I began writing was to fill the void between what I was hearing and what I wanted to hear from hip-hop. I simply decided to take the beat away and focus solely on lyricism. And much of my current dissatisfaction comes from the fact that if I now had to look at hip-hop for inspiration or guidance, I feel as if I might be misled. I don’t doubt for a minute that these emcees, with their bandannas and ice, are soldiers. That’s exactly what they are. But I can’t figure out who’s giving the orders, or whether there is any actual order.
So the question remains, what would I say if mainstream rappers were listening? Perhaps I would begin by asking them what would they say, if the whole world were listening? Then I would question whether they were aware of the fact that the world was listening and responding to all that they said….
We are defined by our ability to resonate and shape sounds. Word. Therefore what we say is of the utmost importance. What we say matters (becomes matter). That is why the spiritual communities have always had people recite prayers and mantras aloud, because they know that they will affect global consciousness and reality itself. We see
m to have once, subconsciously, known that in hip-hop as well. Our earliest slang, “word,” “word up,” “word life,” “word is bond,” all seemed to revel in this knowledge. As Guru said, “These are the words that I manifest.” We nodded our heads in affirmation and then when Biggie named his first album Ready to Die we all acted surprised when it happened. Word is bond, son. Plain and simple.
How much senseless violence have we spoken of without taking into account the possibility of our calling these things into existence? Emcees, there is a power in words. There is a power in sound vibration. It affects reality. In fact, it determines it. Hip-hop is much more powerful than mere party music. I don’t mean to bring no hateration to the dancerie, but hip-hop, because of its hard drumbeats and conversational chants and rhymes, has the power of any sacred ritual. It is no coincidence that it has reshaped and redefined youth culture, globally. I am not suggesting that we not aim to depict our realities through our music, but we should also realize that we shape our realities as we depict them.
Why is it that if you flipped to BET during the World Trade Center incident it was showing videos when every other station was showing news? It stood out like a metaphoric commentary on the relevance of contemporary black music. Is the latest and most important news in the black community that Jay-Z and Puffy have gotten off free while we remain enslaved to their senseless ideas and lack of ideals. In the latest Bad Boy release there is a lyric that says, “Bad Boy ain’t going nowhere until Tibet is free.” Why would anyone align himself with the type of oppression that keeps the Dalai Lama from being able to return to his homeland? You may ask why I am calling the names of a few rappers, as if they are to blame, I am not placing blame, I am simply raising questions. The fact of the matter is that there are no famous philosophers or thinkers in this day and age. There are merely famous entertainers. Yet we associate with them by their philosophy. If you believe that “bitches ain’t shit,” you know who to listen to. If you’re a hustler or a playa, you know who to listen to. But when we sing along with a song, are we operating off of our highest principles, or are we saying things that we would take back if we thought seriously about it? And what if you don’t take it back? Is word still bond? Are these the words we manifest? Are these the prayers and mantras of our community? Are we determining an unchanging reality by focusing on keeping it real? We are not powerless. We do live and speak with the power of determining our realities and affecting our environment both positively and negatively. Hip-hop at its best was strategic, and the strategy at that time was about a bit more than getting paid. The problem is that we are ignoring the lessons that we learned from KRS, Public Enemy, Rakim, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah and other golden age rap groups that revolutionized hip-hop. It has been said that those who do not know their history are bound to repeat it. It seems that hip-hop is in the midst of either relearning or forgetting lessons that have already been taught. But don’t get me wrong. This is not a plea to rappers or whomever to become more conscious of what they say; this is not someone trying to enlighten minds. This is a prediction. If you are in some way affiliated with any of these emcees getting airplay, or polluting your airspace with their lack of insight, I would advise you to begin reading aloud. Your shit will not last. You will manifest your truths and die in the face of them. These are your last days. We are growing tired of you. We love women for more than you have ever seen in them. We love hip-hop for more than you have ever used it for. We love ourselves, not for our possessions, but for the spirit that possesses us. We honor your existence. We honor your freedom. But a freedom that costs, obviously, is not free. Watch what you say. Watch what you value. Planes crash. Bank vaults are airtight, you will suffocate in them. Cars crash. Word life. Word death. Your hit songs hit and run. We are wounded but not dead. And we are coming to reclaim what is ours. The main stream: the ocean. The current. Our time is now. Word is bond.
The Dead Emcee Scrolls Page 10
