We are taking this world by storm!...

All the ice in their hearts never kills us...

Now we’re switchin’ their cold pipes

to warm...

...Trading hot blood for poisonous

spillings

that are fouling the streets as we speak...

Cruelly shaming poor feet with their ilk...

...All the set adrift minds that we meet

Beg a message on banners of silk!...

We are bringing our voice to the town!...

Tell your brothers, and wives, and your sons...

Tell your husbands, your bosses, your daughters,

all Trans friends, and those lost in the slums

that it’s time to take stock,

we cannot sit like rocks,

we have got to break free

from this monotony

that seals up eyes with a well hardened glue...

It can happen to me...

It will happen to you!...

With our backs to the wall

all this squirming won’t help...

We must charge ’til they fall!...

...And when their opened up

by a gash to the side

all the change will erupt

like the coins from their purse,

and their pants when they hit

the concrete as they burst...

Watch them lose all their shit!...

...We must all lift this curse!...

It is well time this happens!...

We cannot waste one day...

Every heart needs a passion,

as we’ll rise come what may.

01-20-20

Slack_Selassie

edit #3

We idealize children’s tears. Atticus Finch tells Jem, “Seems that only children weep.” Ally Sheedy’s Allison in The Breakfast Club pronounces, “When you grow up, your heart dies.” Both characters speak sentimentally of the deep feelings of children, raising up their emotional navigation of the world as an inevitably crumbling ideal. How many other films, television programs, and books are founded on the premise that kids perceive and feel what adults cannot see or forget? We hold a cultural belief that children’s naiveté affords them wisdom—to our detriment. Emotional vulnerability is not a polestar; adulthood does not consign us to coldness. Romanticizing children’s feelings prepares us only to grieve what we’ve lost, rather than building durable beliefs, feelings and understandings that can sustain us through adulthood.

Children intuit fairness and rightness, guided by their gut. (Their sense of right and wrong is not always so infallible as popular culture suggests, but we’ll leave that aside.) But to evaluate justice and morality through personal feelings is to follow a dictatorship of one. Are we to always trust our feelings as right? What if our feelings change or lessen? Outrage is powerful; outrage often fades. Better to construct a deeper, fuller understanding over time. Ethical principles might begin as feelings, but they are built on complexities, reasoning and examples. We need the structures to outlast youth if our world is to improve. Additionally, leaving oneself fully open to pain is not a pathway to moral enlightenment; it’s a recipe for madness and paralysis. It’s true that calluses on feet and hands make feeling more difficult, but it’s not impossible, and the tougher skin makes it possible to keep working. Moral anger is useless if the person feeling it cannot work to make things better.

In a very different vein, we sentimentalize the fresh joy of children. It’s hard not to—set up a sprinkler for a group of kids on a summer day and just watch, or think of the happiness of a five-year-old on Christmas morning. We should take delight in the joy of children. We make a mistake, however, if we pine for that simpler joy. It might be powerful, but it is not more meaningful than adult happiness. The new-toy-from-Santa smile is not more profound than the warm-home-with-family smile. In later childhood, first love is transporting and absolutely absorbing. It feels very different from third love—but the emotional intensity of first love does not make it deeper or richer than the bond of a longtime relationship. And seeing the beauty of a frozen lake or a mountain or a bird does not have to matter less when we’ve seen it before. In no small part, childhood joy depends on novelty. A thing quickens a child’s heart because it’s special, and it’s easy for a thing to be special if it’s new. Familiarity and contemplation can also uncover the rarity of a thing, however, and more meaningfully. Newness can come from nuance, not just brevity. And nuance, thankfully, is infinite.

We can and should remember the feelings of childhood. Those tears and laughs meant something. But if they dry up as we grow, if they appear less readily, if they come from emotional swings of lesser force or rapidity, that does not have to mean we’re dead inside. Childhood feelings must be a starting point from which we grow, not only rising upward but also sending down roots lest the coming winds uproot us. Instinctive outrage and novel joy are superficial for all their strength. We owe it to ourselves, children, and society to cultivate something lasting. An oak outlasts the bloom of a flower, and it’s no less beautiful.

I see a critical mass,

and I am put to task

by the political hounds...

...their always lost and found...

...And they swear

by their thought

like it's all

that they got!..

I see a critical mass

between our working class,

and the trust fund elite...

...their all white as a sheet...

...And they swear

by their thought

like it's all

that they got!...

I see a critical mass

where the spending of cash

is compared to God's will

with a damnable skill...

...And they swear

by their thought

like it's all

that they got!...

I see a crit-ical, crit-ical,

crit-ical mass...

I see a crit-ical, crit-ical,

crit-ical mass...

I see a critical mass...

I see a critical mass...

I see a crit-ical, crit-ical,

crit-ical mass...

01-19-20

Slack Selassie

Humanity died fast when the list appeared.

First came the suicides. When you see yourself at the bottom of the list that supposedly represents all of humanity, it’s hard not to lose hope.

Then came the murders. Of the people who had discovered the list. The people who kept it running. Some decided that the list was fake, and that anyone who believed in it deserved death.

Eventually, we stopped. Killing and fighting and tearing each other apart. At least for a while.

I was born with a number on my hand. I don’t remember what it was. No one can tell me, because you can only see your own number. But right now, my number is 3,425,007. Out of the eight billion people on the earth.

That’s one of the better numbers. My mom told me once that her number had dropped to 6,331,909. I thought she was kidding until I heard the gunshots. One that took my sister. And one that took my mom.

I don’t know why my mom killed my three-year old sister. I don’t know why she killed herself. And I don’t know what the number on her corpse was. Because as far as I know, your number stays with you forever. Even when the only one who can see it is dead, it lives on.

I’d like to imagine my little sister was 1 on the list. Maybe 2, for that time she killed my fish by pouring too much food into its bowl. But other than that, she was perfect. I can’t understand why the cosmic power that decides where we stand would put her at anything less.

No one else understands, either. Everyone has their own idea of the list. I guess that before it showed up, people were content with their own views of right and wrong. But now that someone is deciding for us, we’ve gotten desperate.

A few streets from my house is a church. The sign outside says “God forgives all-Numbers are warnings, not punishments”. The church three blocks away is telling me to ignore the list entirely, that it’s a construct of the devil made to deceive us and turn us away from God. And the synagogue on Bailey Cove promises a way to move your number up the list, and a better understanding of why you were ranked where you were in the first place.

My mom and I went to a church back in our hometown that told us we had to be honest with our numbers and share them with the world. The next church we tried told us the list was a gift from god, to tell us when to repent. My mom loved that answer, but I wasn’t sure. I stopped going to church as soon as I could, and mom’s death didn’t do anything to persuade me to return.

I’ve always wondered who’s at the top of the list. You’d think they’d be on the news all the time, sharing their five-step plan to being a good human being. But only one person has ever claimed to have 1 embedded in their skin. Anton Icara, famous actor, TV personality, and philanthropist. When the first rape allegations came, the woman who had submitted them had been completely ostracized. After all, this man was the pinnacle of human decency. No accusations could ever stand up to that little number on his hand.

Security cameras don’t see your number, though. All they saw was Anton’s fifteenth murder. The same woman who had tried to tell the world what he was really like lay dead on the floor, a knife in her chest.

I wonder sometimes if he really was the best person on earth. If our own view of morality fell apart somewhere along the way, and he wasn’t lying when he told us that he was the only person who understood what perfection was. It seems plausible. When I was a kid, I wondered why the Bible banned so many things that sounded perfectly moral to me. Maybe the list works the same way. Maybe that’s why giving to charity didn’t move my number up the list, but watering my houseplants did. Anton Icara might have been right.

Then again, if he was lying, why did we all believe him?

I don’t know why the number on my hand is there. I don’t know what it means, what it wants from me. I don’t know who decides our numbers. And I don’t know what will happen when I die.

All I know is when this bullet goes through my head, I won’t be looking at the number on my hand.