Yet Again

 
 Yet again
 the relentless chatter,
 embarrassingly inane;
 
 the world is too much
 with us,
 
 a rebuke to our soft lives.
 
 We are forever picking out constellations 
 from these days,
 to fit who
 and where we are. 
 
 The present rearranges the past. 
 We never   tell the story completely, 
 because a life
 isn’t a story;
 
 it’s a whole Milky Way of occasions.

Nkyrinna

 The paucity of reliable sources 
 limits our understanding 
 of pastimes and politics,
 not discrete categories of experience.
 
 Chimerical projection of new gendered actors,
 took part in formerly forbidden practices 
 that shocked elders, chiefs, and government officials.
 
 Free from the confines of kinship 
 and community expectations,
 embraced individualism,
 purchased imported material items,
 openly initiated local rhythms,
 ballroom standards, calypso flair,
 countrywide cooperation and 
 collective harmony
 disempowered people.
 
 Not as an embargo of the present,
 the porous boundary 
 between palpable musical energy
 and social change;
 a highly contested realm
 where clothing matters,
 and dress is political.
 
 Musics do not have selves, 
 people do.
 

  * Nkyrinna - This Generation

A Bad Feeling

 
 She’s got a bad feeling about 
 this calligraphic romantic diabolism,
 all nerved up.
 
 Squiggles and disambiguation,
 exhibition of the lazy arts
 with Tinkertoy rhythms
 and obstructed harmonies.
 
 She claims that there ain’t enough pieces of her 
 to go around.
 
 She doesn’t know that
 everyday is anew, 
 a state of constant arrival, 
 another chance
 for a belly laugh dawn.

Lament


 Drowning in fresh squeezed confusion
 with the intensity of a crippled heart,
 
 Dancing to paranoid surrender,
 choking on much useless talk,
 
 The vicious kilter of
 love gone awry,
 
 The world all gristle and ghosts,
 dirges lamenting the nothingness
 of it all,
 
 The nostalgia tattoo throbs
 in memories of the imagined promises
 that could never have been.

How It Is

 How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?
 Body exposed in the golden wind.
     -Blue Cliff Record
 

 I certainly know how to get naked
 and swing from a chandelier.
 Unexpected moments driven
 by music and emotions
 of beauty.
 
 Awkward interactions,
 abrupt transitions,
 bizarre, hilarious, enthralling
 confounding and cathartic.
 
 Lots of costume changes
 radically reconfigured, sutured,
 and amplified,
 they contain and manipulate
 so many influences
 from vaudeville comedy
 to hip hop.

 Snippets of hard-edged music,
 astonishing powerful,
 and unpredictability wild,
 and out there, 
 and free.
 
 Seems to represent 
 an existential struggle against
 habitual prejudice and inequality,
 patriarchal capitalistic heteronormativity,
 or something else.
 
 Postmodern.
 
 I need something simpler.

Those Indelible Atmospheres


Those indelible atmospheres:

 crawling naked onto clean sheets
 with a brand new lover;
 
 floating unencumbered, not touching bottom,
 above the salty waves
 before they crash;
 
 sitting in a dark bar,
 the smell of beer soaked wood
 and the sound of pinball exclamations,
 awaiting the what-will-be-better;
 
 the desert at night,
 the back seat of your dad’s car
 parked in the woods,
 that first kiss,
 first toke,
 first time behind the wheel,
 hitting one over the fence,
 an unexpected embrace,
 or hearing
 you did good.
 
 And others,
 that are yours.