“Dear Histo​ry,
Blitz​!​ It’s my turn now. You can have your mound​s of flesh​,​ leath​er boots​,​ canno​ns and saber​s,​ noose​s and guill​otine​s,​ warsh​ips and fight​er plane​s,​ trail​s of tears​ and blood​,​ genoc​ides,​ dunge​ons and drago​ns,​ ghost​ stori​es and fairy​ tales​.​.​.​.​.​.​.​.​.​.”

–Saul Williams

Dear Saul,

I am afraid that I must stand in utter disagreement with you on this issue.

I believe the current movement, while marketing itself as optimistic, has thus far been nothing more than a major catalyst for unnecessary negativity. Thus, it is no different from the others.

When I look at history, I see the living Word of God wrapped in flesh and offered up so that you and I could enter into the promise. I see a Buddha free from suffering because he finally learned to remove “I” from the equation. I see the intellectual anomalies of pyramids and ziggurats. I see the invention of everything we think is important, as the only thing that existed in the beginning was the basic elements from which everything presently in existence was made.

When I look at history, I see a man on the moon, a broken sound barrier, instant correspondence between two teenagers on opposite sides of the Earth who don’t speak a word of each other’s language. I see the domestication of dogs and cats, the evolution of music, and the creation of the very process through which you now expect to effect change.

Dear history,
Thank you.

“Don’t get excited. She’ll say ‘no’ without a doubt, you see.
And I’ve decided college girls just won’t go out with me.
They make me nervous and they always catch me off my guard.
Like cell phone service, I drop out ’cause college is too hard.”

My apologies for my absence. I have had several non-poetry blogs in mind, but find so little time to write them. School seems to be slowing down a little, for the most part. I’m over the first hump and on level ground again, on my way to the rock face that is finals.

Hopefully, I’ll have a few new entries at least written out within the next couple of weeks and can get them typed up and posted. I guess I’m lucky that, with the exception of two, the only people who read this are blogmadders. How does ol’ Godin do it? Curses to you!

Anyway, do people even use WordPress anymore? I’m so out of the Blogospheric loop these days.

Tried to keep me from seeing the path to the light at the end of the tunnel

But she forgot that the Son of Man resides not in my head, but in my heart

And stands there hand in hand with the daughter of YAH

And, in spite of my internal darkness, they saw the way back to the sadness factory where all third eyes could be taken to be repaired and re-sown

Or maybe even traded, upgraded, and resold

Stories of third eye visions retold

Enlightenment for and from the young and the old.

(Two way streets)

And who’s to say? Quite possibly,

It’ll come back to me.

And when the story of my own undoing

Becomes the doing of my own being

Then oh, ho ho! Bazing!

The “cyclical relationship. . .has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect.”

And the circle of enlightenment

Having become complete

Will form the eyeris to I,

The pupil.

Just as McCain does not represent conservatives, Spears does not represent actors, and Bin Laden does not represent Middle Easterners. “I’m sick,” says Shihan, “of Master P being allowed to speak on behalf of hiphop when he represents nothing but everything wrong with it.
“

Black is beautiful, my friends. But “nigger” has withheld America and her younger children from their full potential for almost two-hundred years. And you, the Daniel Emmetts of the present era, are as guilty as every Jim Crow and Zip Coon who ever walked the stage.

“A change is coming when we disconnect, reconnect.” Nirvana is upon us. Enlightenment consumes us. How sad it would be, when certain of your peers spend their days looking to the sky, engaging themselves in conversation with extra-terrestrial life forms, for you to find yourself still lost in the consumption of dirt.

. . .We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue. Statements, such as, “keep it real”, especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is. . .

. . .We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic. Every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference. Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World. Any utterance un-aimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed. . .

“Why do we hurt the ones we love? Why do we let ourselves distance ourselves from the ones who want to be close, shut down and block the love from coming in in some attempt to ‘protect’ ourselves from pain—pain we have felt in our lives from people we love when we allowed ourselves to fully and fearlessly love?

“So really we are trying to protect ourselves from pain we have already had, trying to protect ourselves from feeling that same pain again but by doing so we are stopping progression. We are letting our pain beat us and control our every move. So we are not protecting ourselves from pain, we are holing the pain close and feeding it something it can use to grow and prevent anything else from getting in.

“So at that point all we have is pain. We put out what is inside, so we hurt others. Trying to infect others with our deteriorating disease, we cause pain to somehow fulfill the need to seek vengeance for our pain. So we hold our pain in, spit our pain out to infect whatever love that is trying to get in, and inflict others with this to get justice.

“So when will anyone feel the good in the world? Good exists in all of us but is smothered by others’ pain, then over powered and forgotten by our own.”

-Lizzy (Edited for clarity. Dyslexic Disgraphia tends to render the writings of a thirteen year old rather unintelligible. Most retarded superhero, indeed.)

“When the sun is goin’ down
and there is no place to hide
Even in the brightest light
you might lean toward the darker side”
-Bruce McCabe

Someone asked me, recently, “Are people born good and turned evil or are they born evil and kept away from it until unfortunate circumstances? Or are they born blank!?”

The following is my response, which I think happens to also be a wonderful comment on the current season and the epic chain of events that it has brought on me and several of the people around me. And so I give to you more of my blind religion/heresy (depending on which side of the proverbial fence you like to burry your face in the sand on. . .forgive me. That was too harsh. ).

I’m a proponent of a sort of bastardized version of Tabula rasa (Blank Slate Theory) which states that “individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, ‘blank’, and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.”

I’m not hardcore about it, though, because I do think that there are certain tendencies and traits that are inherent in human beings as a matter of nature. When the doctor slaps the baby’s butt, the baby knows to cry. It doesn’t have to learn that. Nor does it have to learn that tits equal food.

For the most part, though, our behavior and thought patterns and processes are learned—nurture. But there is obviously some nature. Part of that nature, is our sin nature. That, we possess from birth.

That is not to say that a child is born evil and with some desire to do only evil. But they are born with a nature that is wholly self-serving and self-seeking, with no regard to righteousness (that is, what is right; not just legally and morally, but logically as well. Essentially the opposite of sin), and with little, if any, tendency for compassion, humility, or any other element of love. That is the very definition of sin.

And so we are born, with the exception of those things necessary for survival, cognitively blank, emotionally blank, and spiritually blank. Evil itself is not present in us as nothing is prosent in us, yet, still, our tendency is toward what one might (I do) consider evil.

As we grow and as our thought and behavior becomes more complex, the nature which drives those thoughts and behaviors becomes less obvious. And, indeed, the illusion of selflessness is often given. But I like to compare that the The Doctor from Star Trek Voyager. Although he was nothing more than a bunch of lines of code and a holographic projector, he appeared no less human than anyone else. Oftentimes, it was not until someone tried to scan him that they realized that he did not even really exist. Yet, although every action was predetermined, there was an illusion of choice and, although he had no true emotions to speak of, there was an illusion of compassion. So it is for us.

Make sense? Questions? Comments? Bullshit?

You stole all the blue
And gave grey back to you
But mine are more black than blue.
And from this darkened hue,
Fall drops of love
To soak the soi(/u)l and give birth to new.

Drown the old
Birth the new.

I wonder who had the deeper experience, Moses or the bush.