[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Dicen que por las noches no más se le iba en puro llorar
dicen que no comía, no más se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo se estremecía al oír su llanto,
cómo sufrió por ella, y hasta en su muerte la fue llamando:
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay...
What are the conditions of duress?
(SINGING) cantaba, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay gemía,
No way in and no way out.
(SINGING) Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba, de pasión mortal moría
That is still waiting.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The language spoken is a measure of which--
(SINGING) Que una paloma triste muy de mañana le va a cantar
a la casita sola con sus puertitas de par en par;
juran que esa paloma no es otra cosa más que su alma,
que todavía la espera a que regrese la desdichada.
Cucurrucucú paloma,
The language spoken is a measure of which variation--
(SINGING) cucurrucucú no llores.
When the event happens, where does the event end?
(SINGING) Las piedras jamás, paloma, ¿qué van a saber de amores? Cucurrucucú...
When the event happens, when does the event end?
We are hirsute in our desires.
[CHEERING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The distance between the thing and the thing that follows.
We know that the replica is not a vase itself.
We know too that a photo is not the thing.
But sometimes we assume that the photo is a transparent
lens to the thing, a window.
What do I know when I look into the face of your Black face?
What kind of system is at work under your skin
that you're a replica of, or are you real?
Which is the replica, and which is the actual thing?
Replica of what, or whom?
What are we to do with the thing imagined.
There's always a nigger in the woodpile.
[CHEERING]
I like to imagine that the photograph was
[INAUDIBLE] and his son.
Not as a person, but to have the contact
with the person, a contract that says I will try very ardently
not to kill you.
What is the body a representation of?
Each one in relation to maybe a framework
for cultural similarity.
What other bodies are like this body?
Who has this performance of language in the body?
Who has it, it's speech and gestures, tongue of Blackness,
a way of speech or bodily gesture behind speech,
a set of references and understandings around tastes
and tastes, a category of discrimination, of struggle,
a believed or imagined home place, a container?
When one has closely cropped the hair,
does the body, male and female, over the phone
get Black or White, Latino or Asian?
I feel like throwing a brick through the window suddenly.
I feel like vomiting all over the hood of your car.
I got your nigger realness, right here.
The critique here is not of individual or even
collective experience, but of the ways
in which the encircling of particular sets of identity
constructions name them as authentic and true.
We are not, in the first place, singular cells,
as the boys more than hinted at 100 years ago.
Our dynamic of the gaze of the other prohibits that.
What about our culture needs these constructions
to be singular and legible?
And conversely, why does resisting tropes
of recognizability belie a certain authenticity,
negate a certain realness?
This limitation of imagination that,
although well-intentioned, ends up
enacting the very regimes of power, that identity we're
sought to undo in the first place.
We are well-intentioned.
We are now in the marketplace.
There are certain demands for recognizability.
It hungers for the replication of the source material,
regardless of whether or not that source
reflects the complications of stockbroking.
The marketplace demands that the product for consumption
be not so unseeable to us that it is illegitimate.
(SINGING) How much is that nigger in the window?
The power of the fragment is that it resists totality.
When I look into the sun, I see nothing.
Instead, I am visually accosted.
I cannot open my eyes.
I cannot look at the thing I want to see.
I turn away.
I pull my hat down in front of my eyes.
I obscure my vision in order to better see the object.
Divide and critical assessment.
Relative closeness, unfortunate box,
rigid, and no pliable formula in the divide.
To avoid the catatonic state, glaze in whole of what's
not left-over.
They say there are traces, that there will always be traces.
It's a fiction anyway, a construction
of the mind's needs that they hold on to filament gestures
as material.
In the hole, we find a digging, fingernails deep and refuse.
Here is the trash heap, nothing there except a muted wailing.
The order is on the horn.
The order is telling his life story.
We walked the long, hot sidewalk toward water.
Touch here is imperative to hold up
contact, contact of suspense and wanting, to prop up or sustain,
to call into being from elsewhere,
or a reminder of access.
Late, interminable.
I do not know where my house is.
Where is my house?
Summer steams by, every border is cocked and ready,
flattened body against cool Earth.
Live without sound.
Be a cool corpse under wire teeth.
The police are so young, they do not hear the wailing.
Wailing, I'm told, is a figment of your imagination.
What to know of the body's refusal to open,
of the body's hidden cave.
Put the cave inside another cave so no one can reach it.
Perspiration aches.
Strain against your arms.
I have come to you from a metal house.
We had steel barriers to protect us from the sun.
The lake drifts into forever.
Windows here are small, and I cannot see myself in them.
What it is to be captured by spoons.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
When the head is shoved, it naturally resists.
Cover her dark face in black cloth [INAUDIBLE]..
We are infinitely disgraced, wishes, well-wishes, eel.
I am 11, and I am let into a dim room
where my brother and his friends are watching a 32 millimeter
film in which a woman is gangbanged.
Upon entering, the eye distends.
To claim is to maneuver.
Punishment referent-- belt, whip, glory.
We speak to each other through mountains.
You excrete God-likeness.
Whose presence entered my world?
Who decided upon and then let go?
I present you with a phantasmagoric me.
I wear a sheath in jewels, my tits hang out.
I'm unworthy, mouth unfastened, draw in.
I fast, I work, I design, I craft, and then I pour out,
I stiffen upon command.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[NATURE SOUNDS]
The black, the white sort of racist discourse is not a--
You can learn from it, but it's Brown and white, here.
[NATURE SOUNDS]
[LAUGHTER]
So--
[ECHOING LAUGHTER]
So--
All living organisms starting from unicellular beings
have this anticipatory capacity because information
is coming from the future.
I actually-- you are my intended audience.
[LAUGHTER]
Here we go.
[LAUGHTER]
[NATURE SOUNDS]
Poetry is a filmic medium in the way it creates insight.
[NATURE SOUNDS]
[SINGING]
Don't even try it.
It's impossible to vacillate.
Don't even try it.
OK, [INAUDIBLE].
Don't even try it.
If you think you can approach it, step back softly.
Don't even try it.
This is off the dome.
I'm not even trying.
It's easy for me.
[INAUDIBLE]
Off the dome, without writing anything down.
Off the dome, imaginary, freestyling, like this.
Who's hilarious, hagiography and spittle, creeping up,
the corner supernatural rhyme scene New York.
And I'm not your dork, I'm more than this.
[INAUDIBLE]
This isn't cadence.
This isn't slam poetry.
This is your ma'am poetry, mom.
Don't even try it.
Don't even think you can approach BTC,
but we love thee, delicately.
Don't even try to [INAUDIBLE].
(SINGING) We love thee.
We started talking about it a long time ago,
but there were a lot of ideas there were--
(SINGING) We love thee.
Mm-hmm.
Growing in our conversation.
Mm-hmm.
And then, we--
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Kind of accidentally stumbled into this common territory.
Mm-hmm.
And decided to work with it.
And I hadn't seen her since--
Mm!
Mm-mm-mm.
Today.
[LAUGHTER]
Mm-hmm.
[LAUGHTER]
Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So the radical fracture.
(SINGING) The radical fracture.
A clear contagion upsets the static line.
It's as though you've already been ordained
to be stuck in the static.
Do you like it?
Probably.
Do you like it?
Do I like what?
Static.
I fucking love static.
Me too.
Mm-hmm.
I want some static over here.
People love that shit.
Toe the line, do your job, be my friend, write my book.
Write my book.
I got this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When you hover around the subject, a subject that's
sudden, it's something we call it transposition
between time and space.
And that space contains a gaggle of niggers,
screaming out of vestibules, "I'll get you bitch."
When you hover--
When you hover around a subject, a subject that is sudden,
it's something we call a transposition between time
and space.
And that space contains a gaggle of--
(SINGING)
Yeah, I want those.
(SINGING)
When you hover around a subject, a subject that is sudden,
it's something we call a transposition of time
and space.
And that space contains a gaggle of niggers screaming out
of vestibules, "I'll get you, bitch.
You want to battle?
Don't try to tattle tell.
I got to lead you.
Daddy's in the pool.
Play the wife, grab the curb out of the old cock, flop it."
She said, "Can I meditate myself into oblivion?
Can I meditate myself into a mind?
Can I meditate myself into a flow, something like this?"
(SINGING)
"Can you do that?"
(SINGING) No.
Someone should say, "Stop the beat, homo."
(SINGING) Stop the beat?
You know what I mean.
(SINGING)
It's all so familiar.
Drop the beat, kink the beat.
Uh, listen.
Listen, ya ya, I'm telling you.
Listen.
[PERCUSSION MUSIC]
Uh.
When you hover around the subject, a subject that is
sudden, I'm sudden, I'm sudden.
It's sudden.
When you hover around a sudden, recall the sudden.
When a transposition is finding space, it's the greatest space,
and my space is my space.
If I meditate, and meditate.
Yoga, bikram hot.
Hot body on the yoga floor.
They're looking at me.
"Giovanni says," she says to me.
She says, "Giovanni says to me you like to be a spectacle.
That's why you're going to be [INAUDIBLE] putting
your body in his jizz hand."
That's why she says that to me.
And I say, "You to battle with me?
That's preposterous.
You want to try it?
You will get smashed monstrously, monstrously.
Don't even try it."
Sometimes I battle for practice, take on people,
like Vanessa Place, who I love, and love.
If I want to battle her, I battle her.
I called her out at a conference.
(SINGING) He's a monster.
[INAUDIBLE] like a monster, I'm monstrous.
All bravado and braggadocio, but I'm Filipino, Pinoy, Pinoy,
Pinoy, Pinoy-born.
Isn't it so complicated?
(SINGING)
Don't hire the mixed Black.
Don't hire the mixed one.
You can't stand the complications.
Hire the Black.
Hire the mixed Black.
Hire the mix.
[LAUGHTER]
Squeezed his legs together rhythmically,
hopes no one notices this is better than love, because it's
not on my pleasure.
Like pleasure, it's no way to film
the persuasion, the effort, of filling relentless hours.
(SINGING) What you want, babe?
I got what you want, babe.
Just relax.
I'm feeling tense.
To stretch, I need a massage.
I need a massage.
That's what my Scottish daddy says.
He says, "You should get a massage."
He drives a Range Rover, and a Jag, and both are black.
And his house got flooded in the faux Katrina in Vermont.
And he reinvested, put $20,000 in it.
In his tax returns, he just claimed it all back,
and he had claimed 50.
And I said, how could you do such a thing?
But I thought, I'd do the same fucking thing too.
When you hover around the subject--
When you hover around a subject, a subject that is sudden,
something we call a translation of time and space,
and that space contains a gaggle of--
false imagination
I don't want to do battle, I want to choose my rattle.
I don't want to battle.
I want to change my--
choose my-- choose my path.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Incidentally, the subject under discussion
is not in the building.
There might be a one, the one in three, true.
Multiply, were absent, vacating.
We're on vacation.
I am.
[LAUGHTER]
As they get back to you, it's heavy.
But spiraling?
I'm the one they say is an imposition.
These are the comings together of potential, rent boy on 18th.
I wanted that identity.
How much do you want?
I say, $1,000.
But that was enough.
I don't work well in poverty.
When you lick your lips like this, [INAUDIBLE]
you say I'm sure.
It's like you're opening up a [INAUDIBLE]
and you want to explode in the Middle
East [INAUDIBLE] protocol [INAUDIBLE]
and you still got [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
When you hover around a subject, a subject that is sudden,
it's what we call a translation between--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Hegemony doing things, hegemonic principles, [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] It's all about systematic information.
The machine is a machine.
The cars are now [INAUDIBLE] because [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm a gangbanger when I want to be.
I'm an OG, [INAUDIBLE].
If you hover around a subject, the stomach
opens up to the sudden feeling of something
they call a transposition, positionalities
between time and space, the greatest of space.
The space is all about an arrangement, [INAUDIBLE]
when she put on those [INAUDIBLE]..
Put the fist [INAUDIBLE] standing, watching,
and looking at you too.
They should have exchanged dirty jobs.
When you hover around a subject, [SCRAPING NOISE] so deadly
[INAUDIBLE] sitting in the bed, you can do it running,
you can do it anywhere, no [INAUDIBLE],, fracture,
fragment.
Let it fly, fly above all, over the left field,
wing, wing, trance.
Parnassus, Parnissus, Parnassus, Parnissus, Parnassus.
[PIANO PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHTER]
And so we began to see them on the street coming
from different directions.
And then once they got in the store
we didn't tell them to do anything.
We just said, here's some hoodies, here's some sneakers.
Here's the store.
Go in there.
And we're going to film it.
[LAUGHTER]
And so, and then you just-- two of them are friends and two
more were friends and one of them knew some--
And it was just interesting to kind of see
how they would interact.
So I think partly you say, we need you to go in there
and try on some hoodies.
But then that's it.
Power is exercised where it can be exercised.
So the reverberation of the relationship
between the words and the sound make you imagine or see.
So, I don't know, the way film and poetry come
together is full of risk.
Exacting precision, spectacular momentum.
99% of the time, it's the ones in power
who act like victims, who will say, we're not in power,
we're trying to save ourselves for the sake of order.
So Trayvon Martin is fine.
We learned.
We understand.
But there's acts that are going on today that are very toxic.
(SINGING) Oh, beautiful.
[NATURE SOUNDS]
The current conditions are unforeseen.
(SINGING) Oh, beautiful.
And so, how can I respond to that?
And it's by crying, crying in a tone nobody cares for.
[LAUGHTER]
(SINGING) purple mountainside, I'll be there.
So this, preponderance of the visual
is something that is not experienced by the majority
of people on this planet.
However, this wants to be imposed.
[LAUGHTER]
When you have the colonizing effect of the dominant culture
people can adopt the images of the dominant culture.
But they very rarely give up their sounds, you know?
and I think that is an example.
This is like a resistance of connectivity
with the ancient spirit that is transmitted through the ability
to hear, which is dimensionless.
People saying it's not our fault. We didn't notice.
How can we notice when the buildings are burning?
"We're doing everything we can," they'll say.
I think the Black and white is any form of discrimination.
(SINGING) Have you heard, America?
--which is that all living organisms,
starting from unicelluar beings, have
this anticipatory capacity.
Because information is coming from the future.
(SINGING) Sing.
Sing.
Have you heard America singing?
[LAUGHTER]
(SINGING) You [? you grow up where ?]..
Rivers of Exodus.
[INAUDIBLE] mountain.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
A man [INAUDIBLE] pounds his wife's skull
into the shape of his boot.
One time, one time, one time.
The slit in her throat pulses blood into a halo.
Their 6-year-old son watches his mother congeal.
Just wave them into the air.
A man [INAUDIBLE] pounds his wife skull
into the shape of his boot.
[INAUDIBLE] all bitches to the right, time
to put your hands in the air.
The slit in her throat, blood into a halo.
I want all y'all bitches.
I want all you riches.
I want all you Whites.
I want all you--
I want all you people to put your hands in the air.
Pounds his wife's skull into the shape of his boot.
The slit in her throat pulses blood into a halo.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Mom said he wish he was in a bottom of a lake, which
she may have wanted him to see.
Yeah.
I saw that.
Pounds his wife skull into the shape of his boot.
The slit in her throat pulses blood into a halo.
Their 6-year-old son watches his mom congeal.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Pounds his wife's skull into the shape of his boot.
What color is it?
Are the walls stone or wood?
I don't know.
They are cold, mossy, in-between bricks.
I don't know.
They're--
Testing.
Depending on chance.
Depending on chance, she wades, belaboring, absence.
The word is spoken, written, beckoned, relevant.
Pounds his wife's skull into the shape of his boot.
The slit in her throat pulses blood into a halo.
The word [INAUDIBLE] written, beckoned, relevant.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Tight screen separating.
Principled act.
A man, jaw tightly, and only stomps his wife's skull
into the shape of his boot.
The slit in her throat pulses blood into a halo.
Their six-year-old son watches his mother congeal.
Imagines his father stuffed into an air duct.
Lodged under the jail, he crawled out.
His dreams, a lumpy duffel bag of oily rags
and blue-black coveralls.
His dreams, fistful of his father's glistening black hair.
Wife's skull into the shape of his boot.
Pulses blood into a halo.
Their six-year-old son watches.
(SINGING) His dreams, lumpy duffel bags of oil rags and--
Their six-year-old son--
(SINGING) Blue-black coveralls.
His dreams--
We didn't even consult about this.
(SINGING) Are lumpy duffel bags of oily rags and blue--
[INAUDIBLE] writing [INAUDIBLE] this question,
because we didn't even consult that--
(SINGING) Coveralls.
[INAUDIBLE] that you were writing this question,
we're [INAUDIBLE].
We didn't even consult about this.
I didn't know you were, that you were writing
these questions continually.
[LAUGHTER]
(SINGING) Dreams.
We didn't even consult about this.
[INAUDIBLE] discussion continue.
(SINGING) Black is a prize that sires dreams.
Black is the prize that sighs.
Scurrying black blood stool, black as gas,
as soup, as [INAUDIBLE],, as [INAUDIBLE]..
As [INAUDIBLE],, furnace black, crouching [INAUDIBLE],,
and hissing, hissing, hissing, hissing, hissing, hissing,
hissing, hissing, hissing, hissing, hissing.
[WAILING]
(SINGING) [INAUDIBLE] is a good [INAUDIBLE]..
As the made up thing I wear to meet you.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
This time, this time, this time, I will seal you in.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) This time I will seal you in.
The river has no chin.
The river has no chin, nor soulful eyes
after dreams, nor mouth, nor tinder dribbles down
its pebbled darknesses to measure its seepage,
nor means to name the devil it sees.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INAUDIBLE] of the [INAUDIBLE].
Saw a portrait of the [INAUDIBLE]..
I rust, suffused with color and his touching,
I blister and twist my joints and slip beneath the weeds,
dragging, uncoupled, my healed self
from the cave into the lived water to break the hand,
fall into there, the hand untried by reaching.
And woe now, a stain, taking, grabbing my body,
a memory of water sewn into blue grass.
I have seen the bodies like candles coming into darkness,
going murky against the cradling pavement's slight incline,
discolored through spilt bone.
Who held me, seized in death, pressed against a cradling,
absorbing the light like a black hole.
Her face, a staggering axe.
There is a restless luminescence we take in and move through.
This time, this time I will seal you in.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHTER]
This time, I will seal--
[INAUDIBLE]
I don't have faith.
[MOANING]
Mm, baby.
Turning into an orgasm.
[MUSIC - LL COOL J, "DOIN' IT]
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it,
and doing it, and doing it, and doing it, and doing it,
and doing it, and doing it well.
(SINGING) It's our first time together,
and I'm feeling kinda horny.
Conventional methods of making love kinda bore me.
Yeah.
(SINGING) I wanna knock your block off,
get my rocks off, blow your socks off,
make sure your G-spots soft.
(SINGING) I'mma call you big daddy and scream your name.
Matter fact, I can't wait for your candy rain.
(SINGING) So what you saying?
I get my serve on, bring it live, make it last forever.
Damn the kitty cat's tight.
[MOANING]
(SINGING) Mm, daddy, slow down your flow.
Put it on me like a G, baby, nice and slow.
I need a rough neck nigga, Mandingo in the sack,
who ain't afraid to pull my hair and spank me from the back.
(SINGING) No doubt, I'm the player
that you're talking about.
[MOANING]
(SINGING) But do you really think that you can work it out?
(SINGING) I guarantee you, shorty, it's real.
Baby stick it out, here comes the man of steel.
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
(SINGING) I represent Queens, she was raised out of Brooklyn.
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
(SINGING) I represent--
(SINGING) Queens, she was raised out of Brooklyn.
[LAUGHTER]
(SINGING) I'm in the mix now, searching for the right spot
to hit now.
Get down.
(SINGING) Damn, I love a dick down.
You use a rubber?
(SINGING) Damn right.
(SINGING) You are my lover?
(SINGING) Mm-hmm.
(SINGING) The putty good to you, word to mother?
(SINGING) Mad tight.
The only thing left to is climax.
Let's make it last.
(SINGING) Word, we ain't going out like that.
All this time you've been telling me that you was a Don.
(SINGING) I tried to warn you, girl, you wouldn't listen,
now let's get it on.
(SINGING) Mm, you make me wild.
Don't do that.
Chill and wait a minute, baby, let me please you back.
(SINGING) You talk a good one, shorty.
Now you're making me sweat.
How a live nigga like it, girl?
(SINGING) Nice and wet.
We get it on till the break of down.
Damn, you're large.
How a big girl like it, daddy?
(SINGING) Nice and hard.
Safe sexing it, flexing it, getting that affectionate,
chewing it, viewing it, all while we're doing it.
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
(SINGING) I represent Queens, she was raised out of Brooklyn.
[INAUDIBLE] because that's how we always like that.
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it, you're swell.
[INAUDIBLE]
(SINGING) You're swell.
[DOING IT ECHOING]
I have nice gates.
Oblivion singing.
(SINGING) Make it bounce, sugar.
(SINGING) Long as you can bounce me back.
Skin.
(SINGING) More flesh than the--
Greek skin.
I'm not singing yet, but if I stop singing--
[ECHO]
Still working, guys.
Still working on that.
I don't want an opinion.
(SINGING) One of a kind when it's time to mine.
Camcorder and the whole shit.
(SINGING) Press wing.
Let it flow on screen while we puffs the L. Laying back--
[ECHO]
(SINGING) Word life, I like the way you F with them.
Go to sleep, tomorrow I'll take you back downtown.
We'll be--
(SINGING) Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
Doing it, and doing it--
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]