Eroica 1

(in E♭ major).

Now, I am second guessing, but in principle aren’t we worth more

than sparrows? But here too, even after dying and a forced landing,

I am lost for words. What can I tell you about the history of violence?

This is our misfortune: to leave hot summers and embrace a forced

migration. The minute I wrote this I became an armed man. If you

ask me, it’s time to get out of here. But before we do, what if we go

back and reconnect with our people? Not to the IDF commandos

spraying bullets. They did as ordered. Not to the oligarch with his

overdressed Russian girlfriend or the soldiers asleep in the control

tower awaiting their own destruction. We can skip the passenger

headcount and the follow-up report (salted with fingerprints) by the UN

aviation agency. It tells the story of the diverted passenger flight from

Athens, but excludes the ones boiling beans over a slow fire watching ants

on a chicken bone from the day before. What follows is an account

of the nature of birds or the nature of glory, or the nature of what made

Moses lead us out of Egypt, or the nature of fury. I imagine it’s something

you would want to come back to, like this painting that allows us to crash

through the wall of a room. Ever tried it? I know enough about living

to know that the canvas is merely a cluster of spatial theories in the shape

of a landscape. Brake lights. Black car. Notice this new decade lengthening.

It’s summer and yet you know next to nothing about me, except the old story.

ii. samo© ... as an end to boosh-wah ... 

(in C minor)

What follows is a description of an unknown timeline. In December 1969

Thelonious Monk taped a show for French television titled  Jazz Portrait:

Thelonious Monk. I, Basquiat, would have been nine at the time. This is two years

after Ngũgĩ publishes A Grain of  Wheat. Flawless! At one point, the text reads,

Then nobody noticed it; but looking back we can see that Waiyaki’s blood contained within

it a seed, a grain, which gave birth to a movement whose main strength thereafter sprang from

a bond with the soil. Rewind your mind. Press play. Such erasure should surprise

no one. Anyway, back to Monk. Listening to a live recording is like observing

a low solstice. Deep silence and its imitation meld into a narrative so that you can say,

I was there when. Feel free to add your own peril. Monk’s music is devoted

to reversing the silence, in the same way that da Vinci was devoted to discussing

the moon’s brightness relative to the sun. Mark their ways and what they capture.

Mark the border, a field’s end, that place across the street, the twelve, seagulls

defending the shore, dogs sleeping in mud, airport walls in need of repairs ... etc.

Mark the harmonic function of everything repeating. A tarmac road leads to

more tarmac roads. With this careful adjustment made, it turns out that if the runway

and plane could speak to each other then we would have a gate in this lengthening

summer. Which is another way of saying  June 1976—red ants have found the trees,

guards are sweating oil. In the background my veins thicken like wings. Sidenote:

my marriage to Madonna would have failed. I treated her face on the New York Post

like the Holy City of Safed. At this slip boundary let us use the second act as a getaway car.