Back and Forth.

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March Fourth.

Her dread locks are limp tower blocks, forehead
for sky, nose, a shrouded figure speeding by,

back packed with sketchbooks and gas masks,
jeans patched more times than he’s matched sticks

to spliffs. He is a loose hoodied slouch
with spray cans, crouched by a

——-

TRAIN? train yard? ware house? crumbling walls? where do graffers go to let go? what is the stereotypical location?  A poet friend, Ainsley Burrows has an amazing poem called ‘Black Boy’ which describes a boy who ‘penned his greatest verse on the window of a train, and watched it  slide off into the killing twilight’ Graff artists back in the day wished for their work to be seen across a city and this was how they did it… as the train trundled through a city a hundred thousand people would see it.

But for dramatic purposes and the movement of this poem, it think it is best to keep him and his creation static, in a train yard? perhaps. Now I have to link the poem to the section below. and the bridge is music.  The purpose of the character below is to conjure the idea of the birth of blues… so I see the figure as a slave / field hand trapping his emotions in a guitar.

I’ll need to link graffiti /hip hop to this, to blues, to an African, and I think the image will have to be a drum… in that is it prevalent in hip hop and in African cultures, not just as a means for keeping time, but as a means of communication.

———————

in the fingernail of a field hand so straight-
jacketed, so stitched, he won’t twitch for shit,

and the unplayed guitar riff, like ghost graffiti,
reefs over his heart and dies.

—

stay tuned…

Inua x

It’s late. I’m 9 months pregnant and I just did a 14 hour day so I could clear a little desk space to spend some time on the big LOVE project – ie Notebooks. Wanted to upload some pics, but short on time and energy. This is a bit like when someone’s in a workshop and makes all these excuses for their draft before reading it. JUST GET ON WITH IT. (This is also the sort of NOTE I write in my Notebook, but going straight to screen here. Making amendments as I go – edit is on. No touch scratch of pen, paper. Sense of audience is stronger whether that is mythical or not.)

1. Woke clutching the long sausage pillow that alleviates aches due to drum stomach big as an old, creaky schooner, full of mercury, saline and child.

7. Ordered Singapore fried rice, egg fried rice, pok choy. No more prawns. Ignored tuna maki. Watched S bite into the back of a soft shell crab.

Pushing the idea forward… Now that I have introduced Jay at the start of poem, she must be the departure. I freestly in my moleskin to see what comes…

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March 4th.

Her dread locks are limp tower blocks, forehead
for sky, nose, a shrouded figure speeding by,

back packed with sketchbooks and gas masks,
jeans patched more times than he’s matched sticks

to spliffs. He is a loose hoodied slouch
with spray cans, crouched…

It seems to be about hip hop. I am a city boy and I tend to write from this perspective, mix it with the lil philosophy I have dabbled with, and my small time some time wisdom. It makes for interesting parallels, with the jungle, with literature, with the body… this parallel is with graffiti… which I think is a physical manifestation of the art of rhyme: of hip hop..

stay tuned..

I had another dream about the baby. This time I’m freewriting straight into the post. The baby was blond haired and very like S. Nothing like me. It was a girl but like a boy or was it a boy like a girl? In any case the monkey has stuck with me. The elasticity. The strength and physicality. Someone asked me if I’d had strange dreams which was a symptom of pregnancy – and I said ‘no’ – then the very next night I had one, and then another consecutively. (Pregnancy has ‘symptoms’: interesting – is it partially in our consciousness as some kind of dis-ease?) Anyway: I need to keep that brute physicality in mind. It was frightening – or fascinating. The blond baby was also intriguing. I want green eyes so I want the baby to have green eyes. But you need green to get green apparently. Brown and blue won’t do it. S and the baby were alike. I felt a bit left out. The baby was older. Could sit up. It was however human! So I’m thankful for small mercies. It’s late now. Over and out.

Tools of the trade. I work between Moleskin Sketch Pad, My Moleskin Note book and lil back pocket pad, and my Mac That is all you need to know, lets go.

Tools of the trade.

So… I am into the magical realist style of thinking and ways of thought. Most time, I have one foot on earth, the other tweaking out on Saturn and I try to give birth in this position. I like to freestyle with words and see what my subconscious throws up. On a train hurtling back from a week long writers residency in Scotland, I started thinking about who would have loved the experience and the name the bubbled to mind was ‘Jay Bernard’ – a friend and poet, and remembered something she said that tickled me. She said she liked her birthday, March 4th, that it called for action…

And earlier in the day, I considered a world without black music and the shudder that travelled my spine ended with an image I penned into my back-pocket pad… “it is blasphemous as the blues played backwards, reversed, un-invented, trapped in the fingernail of a field hand, so straight jacketed, so stitched, he won’t twitch for shit..”

I want to put the ideas together.
I have a character, a blues-playing field hand.
A Starting point:

‘My friend Jay likes her birthday
she says it’s a call to action: March 4th’

Tune in tomorrow for the update.
x