Champagne Chrysalis

Mouthful of caterpillars,

I don’t let them

Enjoy their chrysalis before

I blow

My personality

Explodes into rooms

Like the police who kick in doors

Of brown people like me

Raised to take myself too seriously

I autograph my personality on the walls of

Everyone I meet

Hoping for impact rather than respect

I flood the basements of logic with my malapropisms of

Grace hell bent on being more free verse than haiku

Everybody likes haiku

But who remembers haiku?

My mind was cocooned until the age of 21

When I started staying up all night

Swearing the sun was up the whole time

Swallowing mouthfuls of the moon

I got drunk on myself for the first time and was

Engulfed in my multitudes

Sometimes I get too big

Perhaps that will take a toll

But for now I’m swallowing the ocean for the

Times I swallowed myself for others

Ligthning in a Bottle

Lightning in a Bottle

Let’s glide between the
vanilla wafers of eternity and
Oblivion gorging ourselves
On pistachio gelato and conversational
Snafu

Fumbling in tangents and inhaling
Stardust in cosmic proportions
Drinking the milky way in our eyes while

Floating through the celestial

You’re the stars since you never
Touch
Earth and I am all dirt

I yearn to speak tongues in your presence
curve balls of diction for assonance’s sake
Hoping my words turn into spaceships
Someday I’ll understand you
or just stop trying.

Her

Some days I try to be novel. Some days I try to live according to novels. This strange friction between living out a novel and living a life of novelty possesses the writer and non-writer alike.

I can only speak as a writer and I know that my life awkwardly exists between my clumsy attempts at creativity and reproducing the stylistics of my friends and the authors I have canonized.

It is a glory that’s wholly unattainable by me – a glory that I will nonetheless attempt to reach to my peril. But, I know this. I know this instinctively. Whoever you worship you become a slave to. And I am constantly trying to earn myself a seat at the table of the gods. It’s a fear. A fear that paralyzes me completely.

I spin words and images of my lovers to appease my anxious heart. I can control the ideas better than the people. And I like it that way. However, it makes me bound by my own book. A leather bound edition written in my language and formulaic understanding of the world. It leaves little room for sympathy and for people to be themselves.

That’s reality. Reality is dealing with what’s human.

And here’s my transition into Spike Jonze’s recent film “Her.” The film is about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an operating system programmed to behave similarly as a human being. In the film, Phoenix – who writes letters as a surrogate for other people as a profession – is reeling from his break-up with his wife who he shut out because he couldn’t deal with her emotional reality.

His operating system (Scarlett Johnansen) is able to serve as his emotional rebound after falling out of love with his wife. The rebound is especially successful for him because it is an ideal. She isn’t real. She is a projection of his needs and wants and is programmed to meet him according to the script he’s written about himself.

The thing that trips up Phoenix is that he is so busy writing the stories of love that keep people together that he feels a sort of power. He feels that he should be able to create love based on how he imagines it. In a sense, he feels like he can manufacture love according to his imagination. And that’s a big struggle for writers. Love becomes something we imagine in our heads based on what we’ve read or something as simple as intuition. And that doesn’t work in the REAL world.

Near the end of the film, Phoenix and his operating system decide to go separate ways as she says, “I’m ready to not be a part of your book anymore.” I think that’s a very interesting statement in analyzing his character and mine.

We need to let others write our book with us. We need to relinquish the pen from time-to-time. We need to stop dominating the narrative. Then maybe we can love people and not let them becomes gods.

Nigga (By Sean Avery)

It’s funny how America praises me and condemns me with the same word,
nigga.
It’s different from its six letter-twin
nigger.
Nigger was said with rope in hand and cross on fire,
white men standing tall and proud like American flags,
but nigga
is said by black boys with red and blue flags
and white boys with no intention to hang,
they just wanna hang on the block,
or in the club,
or whenever else niggas are supposed to be,

my radio said being a nigga is the shit!
We cat daddy while we dougie,
stack drug money,
smoke trees,
party nightly
pop pills
and rock nikes.

Niggas are American rap stars
grammy-winning godsends,
pop culture icons,
worshipped and held in Hollywood zion,

my tv told me niggas got benzes
benejamins and bad bitches
it showed me NBA legends,
revered on the court
and NFL Messiahs
Names etched in Halls of Fame.

I flipped the channel and saw diamond chains,
stretch limos stuffed with models and champagne

damn.
Now I see why white boys wanna be niggas,
shit I know niggas that wanna be niggas!

Big dick, big gun, always making the big play…
Hood rich, ice grill, fitted cap head full of cocaine aspirations,
it’s funny how niggas are treated in this nation.

Niggas built the White House and the Congress buildings…
Or was that niggers?
My bad America I forgot, I’m a nigga now!
I’m the news favorite report!
I’m your kid’s favorite rapper,
your heroic athlete!

I’m not a nigger anymore remember when you changed my name America?
Niggers got whipped in chains.
Niggas get record deals and fame.
Niggas are equal now cuz Obama promised change,
but nigger’s only changed when there masters would set them aflame…

Then they’d be ash…
But I’m not ash, right?
I’m chicken and watermelon,
I’m broken English and project buildings
and I’m famous
cuz I’m a nigga,
not a nigger,

I’m an entertainer,
not a minstrel show

I’m glorified,
not marginalized

I’m a statistic,
not a slave,

I’m a nigga…
Does that mean I’m still 3/5’s of a man to you?
Or am I the man your black and white children wish to be?
The man you painted me with your history books and your tv’s…

Everyone I know wants to be black.
But it’s not cool to be loved and hung with the same word.

The N-Word Loses Another Follower

To begin with, I hesitated in writing this and I’m a pretty impulsive person.

It’s a hard topic to address. Nobody wants to talk about it. You know what I’m talking about, the N-word.

I’ll start with this: I’m African-American and I’ve never been called the N-word before. Ever. So, that has influenced my stance.

Packed into the Fellowship Hall on a Sunday morning I was convinced that the word was justified in usage depending on the context. And I had a scholar on my side, see Ta’Nehisi Coates’ exploration of the topic here (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/coates-in-defense-of-a-loaded-word.html?_r=0).

I believed, as Coates contends, that using the n-word within a certain context stripped it of its past and its horrible negative potency.

I also believed that a certain variation of the word made it less offensive.

However, Dr. Neal Lester was plenty equipped to dismantle my intellectual claims and the audience members were there to provide personalized accounts as well.

During Dr. Lester’s talk he broke down the history of the word’s use and he was adamant about how hurtful its been historically. It’s not that I’ve never heard this before,

It’s just that in a room full of people who’ve experienced this harmful word it was hard to defend it regardless of the intellectual gymnastics I tried to do.

Dr. Lester’s main example was something that he borrowed from a young high school student who said “it’s not cool to be loved and hung with the same word.” This drove home the point that you can’t bifurcate a word’s meaning and use arguments like context to smart away the hurt that people feel.

Also, Dr. Lester quoted Toni Morrison in saying that “definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

The N-word, in its negative manifestation, was created by white people to demonize and demoralize black people. To lynch and beat black people. To make them nothing.

We can’t redeem the word. We can only further the displacement of our advancement through usage.

After the talk, an older woman, seemingly holding back tears in her eyes, told me a story about her son who was bullied in Mesa and called a bunch of epithets in school (including the n-word).

He also had chocolate milk poured all over him and was called shit.

When he was 11 he had the weight of a five-year-old and she and her husband took him into the hospital only to find that he had four ulcers.

 

He was only 11.

And the doctor threatened to call CPS if they didn’t do something.

He was only 11.

This is the same word that’s used to endear? Even if we are using a derivation of the word should we even be associated with its ugly history and bloody present?

Personally, I don’t want any part of that history. I don’t want the blood on my hands.

And now, I’m taking a stand. I won’t take it.

 This was originally published in the Arizona Informant

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

“His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” Jeremiah 20:9

Last night I had an honest conversation with my friend Connor Descheemaker about my race. I’m a black male and I was frustrated about the lack of black faces you see in the Phoenix art scene – especially black male faces.

The logical question becomes, why not? Why are there not a lot of black voices in the intimate Phoenix art community which I love?

Why have they been marginalized, assuming that they have?

We hear about the struggles of Hispanics, but the struggles of blacks seem to be conveyed in the abstract as we don’t tell enough stories about the struggles of blacks seem to go unreported.

It seems like there is a sense of oppression Olympics going on (a term I first heard from Mary Stephens). Whereas blacks, Hispanics, women, Asians, ect are fighting to be the most oppressed and in doing so clash against each other instead of coming together.

Another fundamental reason that there may not be a lot of representation of blacks in the Phoenix art scene is because of the pervasive prejudice that exists between whites and blacks and blacks and Mexicans.

Howard Zinn mentions the notion of divide and conquer in his classic “A People’s History in the United States” where different races are pitted against each other by rich white interests in order to have them not come together and rebel against the system.

This pitting of races against each other is still broadcast in a society where there are mangled messages suggesting intra-racial violence when in fact most acts of violence happen inter-racially.

“The naked truth is that the vast majority of killings in America is committed by members of a victim’s own racial group. There is no “race war against white people;” black social ills continue to be tethered to white supremacist notions, policies, and practices, and Turley-Hansen’s thinking is clouded by stereotypes about black pathology that belies the dynamism of black life and black leadership” said Michael Whittaker. Neal Lester, Jeremy Brown-Gillett and Rashaad Thomas in an East Valley Tribune article recently.

That being said, there are certainly strands of racism and prejudice exhibited against blacks and prejudice perpetuated by blacks. The reason I exempt blacks from being able to be racist is because racism is about power and the ability to institutionalize regiments that oppress large groups of people.

Black people do not have power to create prison systems that inordinately lock up white people to an infinitely greater degree than whites.

We need to start with conversations which can fuel ideological shifts. A good place to go to engage in something like this is at Conversations on Race which will be taking place next month at the Phoenix Center for the Arts.

We need more black people represented in our midst and I’d hate to know that a potential Basquiat was in the shadows because our community didn’t have the capacity to facilitate his/her artistic expansion.

I’ll end with a quote from Cornel West, a great thinker on race dynamics.

““To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America — this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of ‘no’ into the ‘yes’ — needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.”

Love wins,

DG

---

 

I Affirm Affirmative Action

I Affirm Affirmative Action

DG Burns

 

Recently State Press reporter Annica Benning wrote an op-ed piece about how affirmative action is essentially unnecessary, belittling to minorities and essentially reverse discrimination (she made this specific claim in the first version of her article that she surreptitiously revoked curiously after I decided to write a rebuttal  under the notion of ‘accuracy’; however, luckily her ‘revised’ article, though less controversial, is nonetheless still inaccurate).

First, in her initial article she quotes Bill O’Reily – mistake number one.

Bill O’Reily is a racist.

Here’s a quote from him in reflecting on the Trayvon Martin incident “The civil rights industry and our leadership in Washington will not take on the black crime problem because in order to do so, black culture would have to change,” O’Reily said.

So, in order to curb violence in the African American community we need to change the culture? Yes, because African American culture is significantly more violent than white culture and is single-handedly responsible for their violence.

Wrong.

Black culture needs not change, rather, the system that perpetuates inequality and injustice towards minorities needs to be ameliorated. Then, and only then will we see crime among minorities decrease.

O’Reily is essentially calling black culture flawed in some way and that is, well, racist.

In her initial article she also mentioned that “our society has an unwritten rule: that white people cannot criticize black culture.”

This is true only when the person criticizing black culture is doing so in a racist manner and, guess what, O’Reily is guilty.

Second, the Benning mentions that “The primary problem with affirmative action is that it does not help minorities.”

Wrong again.

According to a report from the U.S. Labor Department, affirmative action has benefited 5 million minority members and 6 million white and minority women move up in the workforce.

The fact of the matter is: Affirmative Action is still necessary.

After California abolished its affirmative action policies in 1998 student admissions at Berkeley fell 61 percent and minority admissions at UCLA fell 36 percent.

According to the American Association of University Women, women’s average salary is $8,000 less than male’s average salary a year.

Also, the second graph mentions that “Practicing diversity only for a select ethnic group is discrimination against said ethnic group.”

Since when is affirmative action about one ethnic group? The author fails to mention that women and all minorities benefit from affirmative action.

Next, Benning claims that “The saddest aspect about affirmative action is it belittles minorities.”

She knows that because she’s of course a minority.

Nope.

Affirmative Action affirms minorities because it empowers them by providing them with equal opportunities.

Lastly, white people generally see affirmative action as reverse discrimination. However, let’s be real, that doesn’t exist.

I think Sara Luckey from Feminspire says it best when she states “When white people complain about experiencing reverse racism, what they’re really complaining about is losing out on or being denied their already existing privileges. And while it may feel bad to realize your privilege is crumbling and the things you’ve taken for granted can be taken away from you, it is unfair, untrue, and disingenuous to call that experience reverse racism”  said Luckey.

This article is a classic article complaining about minorities taking away privileges from white people and is oddly directed at minorities exclusively. I can’t imagine how traumatizing affirmative action policies must be for someone going to a university is. It must be catastrophic to be enrolled in school and know that affirmative action is still rearing its ugly head.

The truth of the matter is this: minorities and women (who are oddly enough not mentioned in an article written by a woman) have had their teeth kicked in for so long that when they get a chance to eat at the table with the white men they will take it every time and that’s justice, not discrimination.

Reach the reporter: dgburns@asu.edu

Jelly Brick

 

Jelly Brick

The red paint skips bricks

Exposed to ray abrasions

Straining against a solitary confusion.

 

The bricks are a wall and a furnace and

The world is poison declawing the best of our generation

And maiming the rest.

 

Double entendres delivered snickeringly

As the jelly fish stings because it is

Too open to the world. 

The Funky Autopsy: Myrlin is a Wizard After All

 Arizona is a hard place to love for a lot of artists and not just because of the heat. A lot of it has to do with the backwards politics that govern our state that runs contrary to the universal human rights often celebrated by the artistic community. Arizona is specifically hard for minorities. The prolific spoken word artist ,Myrlin Hepworth ,as a biracial (Mexican and Irish), is able to have his two feet in both worlds. With this he has the bifurcated vision that allows for a beautiful album to unfurl that’s uniquely Arizona. Now, Myrlin’s debut rap album, The Funky Autopsy, encapsulates much more than the struggles of an Arizona minority, as it is a “wibbidy wabbity” funkadelic breath of fresh air that deviates from the typical posturing that characterizes mainstream hip-hop. It’s a tapestry of stories, jokes, jests and love. But most of all it’s truth. When listening to the album, it’s easy to believe everything Myrlin says because he’s not trying to be something he’s not. And that’s important and rare to achieve with hip-hop. Instrumentally, the album is spectacular. Myrlin seems to prefer live drum beats in the style of The Roots over the typical hip-hop beats, which will make this a fun album to hear live. The production shows that Myrlin has a taste for a lot of different types of music. There’s even a Cody Chesnutt sample on the track “Germination 2.0: Roots, Seeds, and a Chesnutt.“ It’s a very bright and light-hearted album for the most part–something you can play with your favorite girl or boy and smoke, dance or drive along a hot and dusty Arizona freeway with and feel cool. It’s very funky. Lyrically, Myrlin, who is a much sought after performer, does not disappoint. There is a lot of depth to his lyrics, but at the same time they are highly populist. They are a multi-layered portmanteau that offers something for anyone at any age. And it’s appropriate for any age–a hard thing to pull off in a rap album. My favorite track is definitely Mixaca: Bedroom Eyes. It’s a song that has a heavy bass line a laid-back drum beat, a bit of heavenly orchestration and a subtle guitar riff. The story, however, is even better. He recounts a relationship he had with a girl with epilepsy who has an electric mind, both literally and figuratively. There are so many beautiful lines in the song, but the stanzas that end the song especially pull a chord in my heart strings — “Mixaca, your body’s cove/the sea I roamed the day we relapsed/ and you came back home./Waves crashed like a flashback in my eyelash/Hope you know that I love you.” A track that might become a theme song for Arizona protests is his song “Arizona I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.” In this track, Myrlin raps that “Listen little man,/This is how they call you a crook./First flip through that history book./Funny how so few faces belong to Black,/ Brown, Latinos and Asians/ Reflections? Mug shots on the evening/news.” Yet,. Myrlin isn’t just a socially aware rapper with a pension for writing love songs. He also can strut in battle rapper form. The track The Funky Autopsy is wicked in delivery. Myrlin points at other rappers with his tenor voice as a clarion to proclaim his grab a spot in hip-hop “Hip-Hop colors my mouth like the blues./The shade of my voice, you couldn’t/measure the hue/Shit, I pity the fool tryin’ to place me in a box/I’m real hip-hop/The puppets like Lamb Chop.” This is the first Lamb Chop diss I’m aware of, and I think it’s awesome. Overall, The Funky Autopsy is a theme park that offers rides for anybody willing to go on a ride through the maze that is Myrlin’s brain which is connected to his heart that beats according to the multitudinous rhythms of Arizona’s collective soul. It’s funk, it’s soul, it’s love. He must love Arizona to bless us with this album. Grade: 9/10

The Price of Wisdom

“Wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for Youth.” Ezra Koenig

When I first heard this lyric from the Koenig’s band, Vampire Weekend, it gave me great pause, and I wanted immediately to wrestle with it in my brain.

In order to dissect this lyric, I think it’s important to understand what kind of wisdom Koenig is talking about. Most dictionaries would say that wisdom is an intricate understanding of something and they would be right. However, I believe Koenig is talking about the sort of wisdom that comes from experience and that can’t be taught. As the idiom goes “experience is the mother of wisdom.”

Koenig’s lyric suggests that youth because of a lack of experience are not as wise as adults, which is completely valid. There are those kids who are known for being “wise beyond their years” but those are the exception, not the norm.

Gaining wisdom is not all roses and rainbows. There may be a lot of joy that paves the road towards wisdom, but the road is also drenched in blood and tears. Koenig would want us to believe that youth is better than wisdom because it is free from these painful experiences that accumulate to form wisdom. And pain hardens people.  It makes them different.  It veers them from the path and takes them on a road they never intended to be on.

I can relate to this experience of pain in regards to my relationship with God. At first, in high school, I was exuberant and ready to follow the call of God, and I thought I was for awhile. I avoided all the parties and tough questions and wore all the slogans that branded me a Christian.

I remember even carrying my bible around school with me and once a girl asked if I was a Mormon.

Yet, there came a period of extreme pain in my relationship with God. I felt separated from his/her presence, which I thought I felt in high school, and experienced a dryness that I couldn’t explain. Everything just seemed dry; reading the bible, praying, listening to worship music – they all were motions that became robotic for me over time.

This pain altered the way I viewed God and challenged my beliefs. I at first blamed myself for being so damn sinful (since sin is believed in Christianity to separate you from God), but after awhile I began to question this concept of sin and was reading stuff that painted a different picture of God than the one I had originally received.

This God was about two commandments: Loving Him and your neighbor. And He often materialized in my neighbors the more I became sensitive to it.

My path was changed by pain and I gained wisdom about who God is and the reality of the world as I believe it is, but it was painful.  It was painful enough that I’d rather stay in youthful delirium than go through the pain necessary to gain the wisdom.

Because of the experiences I’ve had with doubt and God, it has made me more open to experiencing God in people and less open to experiencing God alone. Maybe this is a form of codependence and I don’t know it. I definitely experience God when I write and when I read something insightful.

For the most part my relationship with God has changed. No longer do I look at scripture as the final word or the only word, but as words among many and I cherish the words of everyone. Yet, there are moments that I sincerely miss my old-school belief in God and the innocence of it all.

And so, I can agree with Ezra Koenig and say: I’d trade wisdom for youth any day.