Excavation & Truth.
Before we get to the meat, here are the bones: The Democratic Republic of Congo is under siege, so is Ayiti, so is Palestine, so is Sudan. I absolutely feel their pain, and pitiful as it is, know I (I don’t know how else to say this without making it in a way about me) cannot pick up a toolie like Franz Fanon or Amilcar Cabral did. I am, however, convinced that all Afrikan and subjugated people across the known universe own and possess, and have two inalienable rights: the absolute right to violence, and the even more absolute right to live in freedom on land that is theirs, baking bread that is theirs, and absolutely staking claim to their memory and history and the definition/s of these two. Anyone suggesting the contrary, is an enemy of theirs, and an absolute enemy of mine. No one has any right to uproot us from what we call ours. And, this is the absolute truth. There are no two ways. And no, we will not be praying, we will be witnesses. We will be fighting in any way we can — the sword, the pen, speech, music, poetry — and all other ways of witnessing.
To anyone fighting for anything less than power for Our/s people; keep all that mess to yourself. We know you. Academics, necrophiliacs, demons, pseudo-pan-Africanists; we know the lot of you and we are not buying the game this round. No more of you!!! You are one with the struggle, or you are not. Now sit down, and shut up.
Palestine will be free. The DRC will be free. Sudan will be free. Ayiti will be free. Our colonized distant (distant because distance, because the Middle Passage, because we haven’t yet had a Grounding) cousins in ameriKKKa will be free. Kenya will be free. All Afrikan / Blakk & Brown & Indigenous people will be free. We must be free. We must imagine our freedom/s. We must be free!
I. Being & Accusing.
I come from a tradition of doing things, and doing things right, and doing things the right way the first time. This has become my/the singular ethos governing how I work (do things), as I figure my way through an increasingly murky and tumultuous life. Yes, granted, this whole thing, in the grand scheme of things, and people, and time, and the fluidity or lack thereof of things, people, and, time is pointless. However, there is a certain sick and certainly selfish beauty I find in the act of doing things that are specific to me. Do I enjoy every single activity I am involved in? Do I find joy in every single thing, person, and/or time? The answer is a resounding no. Still, I must find a way to fight through my fears — there simply cannot be another way to live a life that feels worth being alive and living, unless I can fight through my fears. I recognize fear. I know fear. I sometimes invent fear. I know who to fear. I know what fear to steer clear of. I understand my fear; intimately, and afresh, every day, I find myself alive. I have learnt to make sense of fear in the act of staying, hoping, trying, and hoping to stay alive whenever I have found myself — it has been a give or take 10, 900-day thankless adventure thus far! I did this!
The only really terrifying fear I have, or possess, or own, because it is unusually mine, shared as it has been, is, and will be, is the knowledge of being an outsider everywhere, and knowing the danger that this outsideness portends, possesses and poses for me — this body I choose to call mine, these parts of me I have known, those parts that constitute my selves that I have yet to meet, and of course, the multiple minds and voices residing within me. All my selves did this!
I am aware of the death this necrophiliac society intends for me. This is boundless fear. This, I did not do! They did this!
I have seen you and them do it to my cousin. The first man — all six-feet-and-a-couple-more-inches of him, beautiful, educated, Tupac bumping, n*zi-hating, graffiti-practicing, Reggae-blasting, my-Ma-respecting, beautiful, calm, kind, beauty-full — that I ever really looked forward to seeing visit. He always had a new fashionable thing that he would leave me — all of them five or six sizes larger than I, and destined to never be worn because I held onto them as souvenirs. I had a mini museum for him. I saw you do it to this man, this human that I idealized so much so his demons never registered to me. And, I was young anyway. What does an eleven-year-old know about what ails and eats at grown men? This is not wholly my sin, however. I place the blame on you. I know it was you. I was too young to know and understand reverence and adoration and idolatry and what it does to a man learning to become his own. I absolve myself of this sin. I absolutely absolve myself of reverence and adoration and idolatry; the gods I chose were not of my own making. I can only be blamed for choosing, and choosing a man, this cousin I possess, this blood of my blood you and them had already marked for a ruining. You did this!
My face; the proof that generations before (me) have been loved. A face I plan on keeping mine until it is not mine — when you and them have come for me. I know what you do. I know what you did. I have seen what you did.
I saw you do it to my fathers and their genes run in me. I am of my father as he is of his father, who was of his father, who was of his father, who was of his father, who was of his father even farther back still, who was of his father before we learnt what it meant to be Afrikan (maybe Blakk). Men darker than Afrika. Men sharper, wittier, and faster than (all) the knives they (all) made. Men more potent than the medicine some of them conjured — panaceas and cures for what ails the heart, what ails the soul, what ails the mind; what ails the now, what ails the past, what ails tomorrow. They had medicine for time. Men I have seen in the mirror every day on/in/about/through my face; a collage. An aging, beautiful, glowing, growing, gluing of all they were, have been, should have been, and, should be. My face; the proof that generations before (me) have been loved. A face I plan on keeping mine until it is not mine — when you and them have come for me. I know what you do. I know what you did. I have seen what you did. You watched these great men battle unnamed demons, stripped of their dignity, stripped of their families, stripped a wicked-and-cruel-naked for the world to ogle and fondle and subject to anthropology; left to the ravages of this ebb and tide named life unlived and unloved. They were stripped, and stripped… and stripped! How do I know? Wherever they went, I have gone now. I was there, now here; this place I have begrudgingly agreed to call home. I was there, in London fighting a war that was imposed upon me, so I die a death not of my choosing. Nothing has changed. This is the death you intend for me in a world I am loathe to call home in every measure of time. I survived then. I survived yesterday. I might survive today. I will survive tomorrow because I survived! You did this and I survived! I & I survived! You did this!
Your god is milky. Your god likes euphemisms like milk and honey — mine like milk, mine like honey.
I was everywhere at one/a time when the Gods bore my face, and heard my Tigania prayers, and sent Tigania rains, on Tigania crops (maize was not a staple food then), and drank Tigania brew, and caught the Tigania Kaanga Blues, and were Tigania. This god of yours is not human. Your new god is an artifact to me — a reminder of who I am not; you and them have a god that came riding a white horse — I do not like horses. You and them preach a god hidden in strange books casting mesmerizing spells — this god has not brought plenty in August when the Tigania sun heeds no one but its Tigania-self. Your god is milky. Your god likes euphemisms like milk and honey — mine like milk, mine like honey. Your god comes and comes and comes; mine are here, and, they come well — wellness becomes them. I have watched you and them educate, eradicate, exterminate, empower, excommunicate foe your non-Tigania deity. I have watched you and them shame, blame, play the game. I have watched you and them pray for a blood that makes you snow. I and I have seen you lust for the body of your god — pseudo-communal cannibals dreaming miracles of non-communal bread and wine. You did this, you have done this, you do this; The Gods of My People’s People survive. You did this!
I & I, One and One, Us All, We; Antu; we have watched you label things, label people, label ideas, label labels, counter-label labels ad infinitum, dichotomize these labels and the resulting counter-labels, labels, ideas, people, and things, into what is Afrikan (of culture — what culture?), and vice versa. We have watched you counter your labels too. Your labels change. You remain the same; always anti- certain of us because we are, because we have the courage of conviction that allows us to accept who we are and to know who we are not. Your labels have risked Reality/realities. Your labels continue to create things of things that are not things that will never be things. This warping deceives you and them that you are in charge of something in this life, in this space, in this time, in the here, and in the now. You have created conditions that will ruin us all — you will not be able to shop in that fancy mall when your label reads poor; and it will! You will not be able to laugh when they insidiously label those full of mirth as Arkham escapees. And they will! You will not be able to sip on your feet-flavored wine when they identify and label the alcoholics and those fond of dancing when wine drunk. Have no doubt, they will! You will have done this. You and them will have done this!
This warping (because that is the intention behind labels, always) has created sterile things, sterile people — in thought, emotion, and existence) and sterile ideas (devoid of danger, life, exuberance) that do not offend. This sterility has in turn created one large steaming heap of garbage that for the longest time now, passed for culture. This culture is one of institutionalized nothing(ness) and death of everything that could be possibly beautiful or alive. This is a culture that has all the pretensions of being for some/thing or some/one, yet only represents itself, a simulacrum, as a way of life, and death. This is your culture. We did this!
II. Chant Babylon Down.
I live in a ‘Hood where they chant down Babylon
4 days in a week and it’s most peaceful then.
No police, no robbers — who is to say who is who?
We are kept safe by Afrikan Voodoo, there is something we do know.
There are things we have known.
There are roads we have known.
There are wins, losses, we have known.
There are realities we have known.
I live in a neighborhood where they chant Babylon
4 days in a week, and they are most peaceful then.
No rules, no barriers — who is to say what is what?
We are kept safe by Afrikan Voodoo, there are things we have seen.
There are things we have seen.
There are roads we have seen.
There are wins and, losses, we have seen.
There are realities we have seen.
III. Tee Jazz.
Nina Simone — Baltimore.
Mary Lou Williams — Mary Lou William Presents Black Christ of the Andes.
Larry Gales — A Message from Monk.
Charlie Rouse & Paul Quinichette — The Chase is On.
John Coltrane — Blue Train.
Sonny, Sweet & Jaws — There Is No Greater Love.
Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster — During This Time.
IV. On Certain things, Things and Theeengzzz.
On loving life. I would say I am addicted to the act of waking up. Do I particularly look forward to it? I don’t know. I go to sleep hoping I did all I could today, and should I find myself awake when it’s tomorrow, then I shall find things to do. I shall find things to keep me distracted today. Tomorrow is the future. Right now, matters most. When I have found myself awake, I must live. I surprisingly have managed to delude myself into quite an efficient living. I am very rarely bored. And when I am bored, I let myself wallow in that boredom until my mind guides me out of it (and) into something enjoyable. All facts considered, this, the life I lead, just might be a life to love. It must be the life I love. There can’t be any other way to do it right unless I am bored. That’s pretty much it.
On boredom. I am a very boring individual. I inspire boredom, while for me, there are a million things to pursue at any one time, including boredom. When I am bored, it stems from impatience, and my impatience stems from knowing I could move faster and smarter especially when I am in spaces where my body refuses to be in, or when my body refuses stasis. The question then becomes; how can I overcome this little boredom? The answer: I wallow in it. I let it consume my whole body, my soul, my mind, until I find a creative way of getting myself to the other side of it. And when I do, I create only what feels honest to me. Should someone else appreciate what I have created, or not, I choose to take it as a sign that I am doing the right thing, singing the right song, and I only allow myself a moment of celebration before I get bored and go find something else that excites me. This is what I have become. A constant spiritual nomad. I want to know all of who I am before the lights go off. And should they go off before my work, pre- and post- the incoming boredom(s) of course, then I will pick up from right here. I will pick up from right now in my next lifetime be I a crow, a coward, or a dog, or hooman again! This is who I am become/ing!
On becoming. There is this Miles Davis quote about one playing for long in order to (really) play like yourself. I think that applies in/to life too. You live long enough and things begin to click into place. I see the patterns to certain things. I understand the code to being a part of society. I have understood my goals. I have deceived myself into serving only a certain purpose though I must suffer distraction now and then; a purpose only I can define for myself. A purpose I have chosen to pursue (everything else be damned). An intentional, albeit strange path; path to which everything else is secondary. I walk on stony ground. I found myself alive one morning and decided to live a selfish life. Selfish in the sense of I choose to define myself this way. I choose to only consume a certain kind of material that works for me be it books, music, conversations, or relationships. I have also understood when to move and leave these places, people, ideas, whatever, when I no longer receive any joy from them or when I feel drained. I am what I have become, for now, because I choose to. I choose to celebrate this little victory. This little exercise in self-discovery and awareness is my practice and my pseudo-religion every single day. My spirit rejoices in this as often as I/my selves can.
On spirituality. Truth be said, spirituality is risky business. You might follow a certain path for a while, and on getting to your destination, discover that you came the wrong way. Your destination here being whatever end goal you had or have for pursuing a certain spiritual course. In my case, I would say spirituality has been integral to the process yes, but I have been very cautious. I would hate myself if I got enslaved to any single spiritual belief because then it becomes a religion. We all know what religions do their believers and non-believers. I have been struggling to find myself, or versions of myself that I have muted for too long.
On (being) the multitude. I do believe I am a multitude. I am We. I am not one thing. I am not one idea. I am not one place. I am not anything any one person wants. I am not here just to be here; I am there too. I am not all grace and avoidance; I am violence too. I am what I am, and I am what I am not. I am now, I am then, I am coming. I am not knowing who I am to meet of the myriad of my selves out there. My heart is on my sleeve and We just might reveal/show/let be seen the abstraction of it. I have managed to make peace with every new one of We I meet. I have had to wrestle some in a Jacobian fashion. I have had to rescue some. I have had to dead/deny life/cut off the breathing of some. I have had to accept most. I have had to delay meeting some. I have had to let go of some amicably, some maliciously, some very dramatically. But I have found victory in knowing my selves when I have, and when I meet Them. Still, all of Them keep Me/We sane because They are all born of the same intent; staying alive long enough to find The Maze like the Man in Black on Westworld. He realizes it’s a simulation I suspect and doesn’t think too much of the owner. Still, does the owner of the machine matter when you find yourself playing? Methinks not.
On the Owner of the Simulator. I think they got lazy, bored, indifferent, or all of these. They are a kid somewhere looming on, and looking at what they have created and liking it. Both them and We know the game is playing/running itself at this point. This might have been their first or last trial at building the idea of a world. Maybe they succeeded and what we have become is exactly what they desired and had in mind. This what we have become though. And scary as it is, I have made peace with it. The game is the game. Some are trying to change the settings, some are trying to change the scenery, some are trying to change themselves, some are trying to run the game, some are comfortable being NPCs. And that’s gorgeous. That’s utterly beautiful. You choose who you want to be after the Owner of the Simulator has imbued you with certain ideas, and modes of living, and means of movement (capital). In my own small way, I have come to understand the game. I just choose to play it without ever losing sight of the fact that when it ends, it only ends for me. And as with any first-person game, every new level brings new villains and heroes and a mix-match of both. And that gives me comfort; knowing that at every level I am playing against very capable players and some very incapable players too! There simply is not a way or a play in which I come last. I don’t see it. So, at this level, where I am right now, I will learn as much as I can and enjoy every single moment of this; what’s here right now. Then we (the multitude that is I) level up and sort of begin afresh in a fashion similar to the TV every morning — yesterday is old news.
V. Peace.
To me, finding peace really is defining peace. A solid definition for myself. A selfish definition. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Although, this definition is bound to change as…
As you live and age…
Yes, and as I learn redefine the multitude that is I. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Weirdly, it does. I don’t know why, but it does. Do you find parts of you at war with other parts? The multitude is never really all at peace…
At once.
At once. There are days parts of you want to be repeatedly jumping off a high cliff into water full of jagged rock almost like a GIF, while other parts of you want to simply dive off a cliff into clear waters and just swim for hours to no end.
Thing is, the jump is the jump. Be it simply for ruin as in the jagged rock in the water, or the leisurely jump leading to a swim. The jump is the jump. Question is, what parts of you do you let win? You know? The jump is the jump.
No. Yeah, I understand. The intention here matters more than the end does.
Intention changes everything. We just don’t know when we can claim agency over our selves, as many of them as we can find and name within us. There is so much external influence coming at us at any one time that we, well, most of us, have forgotten what it means to have agency over our selves.
I think that segues perfectly into my next question. And this comes off me understanding what you mean by reclaiming control over what’s around me, or my selves. Anger and forgiveness. Should the intention of forgiveness be forgetting or abating one’s anger towards another, or these external influences you refer to?
I believe in righteous anger. The kind that cuts like a Ginsu. The Old Testament kind of wrath. I want to wallow in that anger for as long as I can before I decide to forgive. Thing is, most people conflate forgiveness for forgetfulness. Forgiving is me simply choosing to give less thought and head space to external influence. I choose not to forget. I want to remember. I want to feel the same kind of anger I felt the first time you did me wrong every time I see your face. I want to be able to know and remember what you and your selves are capable of every time your name is brought up. And I hope you feel the same way too if I should cross a line you have drawn for you and your selves.
For you, peace simply isn’t the absence of war.
No. How could it be? Everything is war.
You choose what wars…
Not necessarily. It’s impossible to choose..
…and battles you can win…
Yeah. It’s impossible to choose a war. You found yourself in one the moment you took in your first air. You know? The best you can hope for is to win a few battles here and there, and maybe, find peace in knowing you can win some, but you will lose a whole lot of them. There are more losses than there are wins. Everyone loses in a war. I guess I do my best not to be at war with myself or my selves.
When does it end? This insanity, fighting the whole world just to carve a little piece of heaven for yourself? Does it ever end? Do you want it to end?
I think those are the very questions one should ask themselves or their selves as they define what peace means to them.
The risk here being that you might not like the answers but you have to live with them.
And in living with them, you could also choose to leave in the sense of exiting. When possible, I would advise one to leave as often as possible all the situations that endanger your sense of peace.
Find new experiences.
That’s the point of life I feel. Collect experiences, collect knowledge, and feel free to exit as soon as things feel stale.
Isn’t that how all villains are made?
The Nolan line. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
It’s a very fine line. You live for a while and begin to understand the intentions of both heroes and villains. Raz Fresco has a series of projects aptly titled Magneto Was Right.
He just picked a very unfortunate name for his band.
I guess he was at peace with it.
And finding peace requires a certain amount of insanity. Else, no one would take on the whole world just to find themselves or this selfish definition of peace we speak of.
No. No one would. We would lay down and take the brutality and violence of the world as a rained on dog would. And that would be bad for everyone. We will always need the very insane people to lead the charge. Become role models of some sort.
And that’s why celebrity worship is at an all time high.
Is it? Maybe we just know way more people than we should because social media has made it so. I am always thinking of how many insane people died unknown. You know? And then we discover say a letter they wrote to a friend and we find ourselves down a rabbit hole looking for more of their works. There is always someone coming back to life. Good or bad.
In Afrika it doesn’t happen as often as it should. Our culture was very oral. I am comfortable with us deifying and creating myths around men and women that weren’t too useful to society. It’s time we had Afrikan and Blakk lies. It’s time insanity, at least as we define it today, was glamorised. There is simply no way we didn’t understand concepts like schizophrenia. We did! Those were our priests! We also understood greed differently I want to think. You know? Why have ten acres of land when you can have one, and nine more people get the rest? You know what I mean? This is another definition of the concept that is insanity I think we must have had. I say all this to say I agree; we need to know and understand way more insane people than we do right now.
Yes. Yes. You look at a man like Mansa Musa and understand he was by all definition, a capitalist, in a feudal pre-capitalist epoch. The kind of wealth and power he held can only be characterized as hoarding as say a modern extremely successful capitalist does.
But the legend around him makes him some sort of deity that we can all aspire to.
And therein lies the problem with deification. I suspect that’s why Jesus’ life from the ages of 12 to 30 is lost. If the man existed. Us poring over his life and picking holes into it would create doubt. Doubt is bad for the faith business.
And the faith business is good for all ye that doubt.
Still Afrikan and Blakk lies would go a long way in creating aspirational models for us.
But this only happens when we speak in one voice. Does it not?
The Continental Afrikan would find it easier to gel around common ideas. The damage is done yes, but we can pick pieces here and there and create new histories for us and led by us only. If you catch my drift. Granted, it’s an insane project and would require us to redefine who we are in the current capitalistic global village we unfortunately find our selves in. We should however be cautious of trying to recreate pre-colonial societies. Those too had very problematic ideals that a majority of the then society might have been all too comfortable in chasing. Some ideals from then wouldn’t work for us now.
Okay. We will also need to understand that we exist in this global village as you call it, in a society that just picked off from where the oppressors left. Everything has changed but nothing has changed.
Yes. And most movements purporting to speak for you and me, and us, are backed by the same people who ruined us. At least their children and grandchildren. Or the progeny of our newly educated few that took over from our oppressor. It’s a very well executed racket if you ask me. And I use ‘our’ here very loosely. We are not of them, try as we may. And they are not for us. They’ve just been very good at running the game. We are not the other. We are more than they are. They, are without a doubt in my mind, the other. We should treat them as such.
I hear you. I am always wary of anyone claiming they deserve our love simply because they are deserving of our love.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, we should learn to put up with those we love. Generally. We don’t have much choice. We chose to love them. We are stuck with them, flaws and all.
Do you mean…
Yeah, generally. Not just with our so called heroes. Love is a choice. Liking someone, is a whole other matter entirely. Liking yourself is a choice though. You learn to love yourself in the end.
Even when you have chosen to become a hero as a narcissist will often do?
It’s not necessarily narcissism. Enchantment just happens to have the same result. And that’s a very dark power to have. To be able to charm your way into any room, that’s a dark, dark power. It takes a certain form of scary self-awareness. To know you have this ability and to wield it as often as you choose to. It’s also a gift if used well. The ability in itself is not a curse, the use is the curse. A liberator eventually becomes one we need redemption from, and so is enchantment. And there is peace in knowing and understanding this.
And there is peace is not knowing how to take advantage of this dark power. Or at least not having the mind for such machinations. Yes? There is peace in walking about the earth without the need to influence or become influential. An average life is worth pursuing.
Define your idea of peace…
And you just might find peace.
Yes, because finding peace is purely about defining peace.
VI. All Pre-
It’s not that we do not want to be here. No, we just haven’t been anywhere. Us being here, means our minds are elsewhere. We have already experienced this moment here — we thought about it ad nauseum. What to wear and what it says about us, what to say and how to say it, where to sit (we prefer to face the door for a quick and easy egress, and, who sits with doors to their back anyway?), who to talk to and why and what do we say to them (segmentation is important when having conversations), and, what language to use — code switching 101! Thus, we know this exact moment to the last detail, and should anything change, there are several back up plans. In this sense, nothing is ever real, nothing exists in a tangible form. Moments are not lived through — they are pre-experienced. It’s a safe way to live. For this/these reason(s) we apologize for never (really) showing up. We apologize for staying with the garbage too long — it takes a long time to clean up — the Alphabet Boys are watching (word to Push).
VII. How We Lost a Generation Here
We became slick city dwellers somewhere in between the rote and rotten western education, and a certain desire to live and become more than average.
We were stuck between finding a tribe of people that would miss us when we left the lives we (have/had) finally made for ourselves, and the desire to not feel or worship or kindle or make cots for the same pain our parents had made altars for.
We were to become a thing outside the thing we had known.
We were meant to meekly inherit the earth, the children of tomorrow, the future was ours. Now the present and the future are here. They are here as a constant reminder of that water-laden cloud of forced remembrances and doubtful forgetfulness that we age. Clouds pour when they deign to.
We spent time learning to make time feel better.
We are stuck in a loveless union with time — a one-sided affair where all we are is fodder for the machine and nothing is ours.
We forgot to claw our/selves from sticky muck of existence because we do not have things to claim.
We forgot what it means to find and shed parts of ourselves.
We forgot that Being (present, ongoing, always tense as Baba Amiri Baraka will say it) is accruing and releasing, accruing selves, and letting go of selves.
We became creatures that walk with that ugly thing on our faces that says we have learnt nothing is ours.
We own nothing qualitative. Nothing is ours!
We own nothing qualitative. Not the earth we walk, not the dreams we should make possibilities of, not the dreams that are possibilities thereof. One born of tree eaters always desires be one with the grass eaters; the greener the better. This is where we got got.
We have been denied survival tools; chief amongst them, (the) access to imagination.
We do not imagine an imagination that is a deeply, deeply individual vocation that calls for more than dreaming and thinking.
We forget an imagination that demands to be exercised in dealing with a yet to come future, and a most immediate future.
We do not know and think of and trust and reference and imagine a future in which one must also think of the past as it occurs to us in the present.
We cannot.
We cannot construct new ideas, positively motivated ideas, ideas imbued with more than survival, ideas that allow the creation of what one desires, ideas preceding a future for the communities and spaces and movements we have always wanted.
We cannot be part of individual-communal exercises of imagination. Individual-communal exercises where culture, art, creation, ways of loving, the creation of love, word and world building, the discussion of a new politic, etc., etc. are being actively sought and brought to new light.
We are denied the opportunity, mostly by no fault of ours, mostly by fault of ours, access to remembrances, revisions, receptions, recreations, re-imaginations, reflections, that are covert and overt and important to the making of one’s body more than an altar to bones and sinew and meat.
We do not know what to do with this bag of denial dropped at our feet, this well organized visceral violence on the imagination.
We deal with a machination of a dastardly mix of foreign globalization(s), foreign interpretations of our interior and exterior lives, and a most cynical need for uniformity.
We have lost our Gods. Now we bargain with foreign creatures that promise more and better past here.
We know this is it. It has been known.
We know the names of our faces; they came before us. They survived. They swam. They ran. They walked. They crawled. They did. They became. They saw. They wove tapestries of time and around time and for time and for us — for Our Time.
We are because they are.
We are because generations before us were loved.
We wouldn’t know what language they used for love.
We know love is not categories and groupings and things unnamed and ambiguity and a certain here and now and unwavering and unmoving and unfinding and unspeaking and unresponding.
We have lost a generation here.
