Find You

What's Wrong with the World, part II

I've just finished writing my paper on American cultural failure. I always feel incredibly inspired in that domain when listening to the right hip hop songs, for they, like no other songs in different genres, are able to translate rightful anger and injustice into powerful music. It is their storytelling that makes my mind as focused as their sharp beats. I love these people. They fight for a better world.

Homeland and hip hop. To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture and also about homeland security is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels with some justice that they have been betrayed by those who came before them, that they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hellholes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth that climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society the opposite is true, for here more than any place on earth wealth is so widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. They're very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure, and homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as say military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words; they have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think ducktape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safer? From Deathrow, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.

70 (65) years

A tale of prospective growth

The moment I wake up, I will have forgotten what it was that was troubling me the day before. Needless to say, something that is only troubling for one day (or less) can hardly be called a distinct trouble; it’s rather like noticing that you’ve just finished the peanut butter and feeling vexed about not being able to eat your next sandwich with peanut butter, while somewhere during that process another part of you has already realized cheese tastes much better with this kind of bread anyway. I don’t know what to call troubles like these and I don’t know what to remember of yesterdays, almost as much as I fail to take any pills that are forced upon me by physical prescription. Let’s face it: it has become illegal to die nowadays. Perhaps one thinks that the moment all your troubles have gone away, along with your short and long term memory, there is eternal bliss ahead of you. Instead, I tell you, not remembering what troubles you is much worse than remembering it for, in fact, rather surprisingly, you will always remember that you do not remember anything. Life is a memory falling apart in front of you, with your claws – for that is what they have become, and for some have always been – clinging on to a vast emptiness, and your feet barely walking upon it. For so long, I haven’t dared take another step.

Today is one of the better days. I think I can recall things more clearly than yesterday or the day before that but at the same time I can’t decide whether I’m awake or sleeping. I also think the drugs have made me more numb than usual. I speak French to myself, English to my paper and Dutch to my dead dog. I have accomplished what I was meant to accomplish in this life. In books, when they have reached the part after the epilogue, there is nothing but empty white spaces on an even whiter page. I’m quite sure about my thoughts on the after-life, still, whatever I may have thought about it before; but I don’t believe that I could ever have been so stupid as to believe in something being written on those white pages of books. It is obvious that they are empty. In a way, my life’s the same now. The page is still there but the story has already ended. It seems like the pen could start writing – wait, I mean like the computer could start typing new words any moment, sort of like the half-way break in theater. But there are way too many breaks on this page. Something feels odd. And today, today is one of the better days, one of the clearer ones. When I look up to the ceiling, I imagine an outside sky bluer than the one on the day I met you. Now I remember you and forget you again before I realize that I either remembered or forgot you. Today is one of the better days, one of the clearer ones, and I rise myself from my bed to get the feather to use the last drops of ink that are about to dry up without having written another word.

My heart has started beating just for the occasion, albeit just a little bit, but I don’t desire more. My feet have started walking and the feather has started writing, scribbling words that are incomprehensive and non-lingual, although I’m sure others exist that will be able to read it – not many, perhaps, but some might exist. I’m sure of it. My eyes see one of the largest dunes they can remember – images are easier to remember than thoughts, aren’t they? They are even larger than the one on which we laid ourselves that day, one of the days I met you for the first time. On other days, I would so much like to have met you again for the first time, on that dune, larger than this one, but today I walk past it. I can smell the salt, occasionally smeared through some of the earlier and later and middle pages in the book. I walk until it is only water I feel, and, exhausted, I realize that I need to write only a bit longer. It is much darker than before and I relive the happiness of the clear morning. The day will come to an end soon. The water is even saltier on my hand than it is in the book. My skin takes in the salt and my hands wither before my eyes, as do my feet and knees, and almost my waist now. My fingers stop writing as my head submerges in the sea water and I float towards the emptiness of my memories.

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."

- Clea Lawrence Durrell

I Subside

Am always

drifting,

wandering,

till I

finally

drift off.

Castles, heroes, and so many made-up pictures of you;

Dragons, winged poets, a river of gold and your liquid body;

You talk to me for the first time that I can recall

And I hear it all in exclusively enticing rhyme and rhetoric.

Actual dilemmas appear on the surface of what is, like

I’m not sure whether the first poet alive wrote about

love or about the agony of a lost love;

It’s kind of like a “chicken and the egg” situation.

Voices of teachers,

mothers,

and superegos

pounding on my consciousness.

My mass-produced, easy-to-build and will-easily-fall-apart

desk has never felt more seductively soft than

Now. I raise my head to resist its treacherous temptation

but notice that the air of dreams around me is too heavy.

Mistakenly I think I’m counting the words on my page,

- how many more till completion? -

but I’m only counting the seconds, always slipping away

from me.