Sheth, you are my vision. My power. I have hitched my Whiteness to your Lode Star and will continue with it till day—till daylight—till the break of dawn.
Myriad power sticks. Floating around my head. And you’ve bought me, bought me in my White bread packaging straight from the flour, bungled under milk, in a powdery hand, write through the paper that’s what they taught me in class. They taught me that people hurt—they hurt is what they said. And I bungled through it all to microscope a plate wherein there lies a particle of hurt—I examined it and measured it and took it where it wants to go. I’m wrapped in bubbles of syntax. Cannot escape. Cannot retrieve. Cannot recovery area to your nine plus five minutes—your ten, your eleven—it needs perfection. It was never perfect. It took me minutes to write this book in the far-left quadrant of my brain. It is an extemporaneous exploration of excitability. These wint’ry months stuck inside houses, inside schools of heat and learning. I imagine Sheth and I are conversing somewhere out there. In the halls. Shooting the shit like any cop and any Black young man might do. Talking GPAs and football, entertaining his ideas of calculus and what it might mean for our police department if we just implement differential equations we’d be able to track all sorts of criminals—mathematically!—but I’m sorry son it just doesn’t work that way. I have a problem for every solution. Jab them in your sides like shivs. Twist them around. Like a knife in jelly. At my breakfast table. Your hand underneath the table with my daughter. On my daughter’s leg. So close (so very close!) to that hottest spot. Watching vids on my phone about a White Girl Story, so sad and so close to the truth. You can never understand me without understanding my obsession with White girls. Sore that they convinced me to spell it that way. Like now my text is obsessed with race, too—along with the rest of the world. Gone, done, and dusty in my eye. Long, down the road in El Paso. Past the golf course past the end of the road. Past the last snake I ever saw in the desert. Past the last hill I ever climbed, in tennis shoes with sharp eyes we were supposed to look out for snakes as if they were not looking out for us.
Sheth, you are my visionary child. A Blackness, such despair, watching TV on your school tablet everything propped up on the kitchen counter. A black life, with its culture and its identifiers—it didn’t make sense to me! It was like if you took them from another planet and placed them—dropper-style—in the ocean. And expected them to speak English! To open their foreign mouths and speak English. To amaze us with Melissa and every White child. You could stand at that Black Vagina and wait there for a thousand years and never would it birth a Lincoln or a Jefferson. I call upon Lincoln but post quotes online of his—that were never really his! I don’t know this because I don’t know how to use the internet. I don’t know what I’m reading so I don’t know what’s real or not. This is my mistake! This is my conundrum.
It’s a White boy’s folly. Just a boyish half-step. Understandable! Just a micro-rape in the swamp—nothing that will harm anybody in the long term. Just the punishment of a niggar by the handles of my bike. I call thee away from me devil—has anybody ever said that to you? Any petty little Black mom come all this way to defend her son. Any pretty little black sister come all this way with her brother’s blanket in her hand. Anyone up for some fun? I’ll say we rope this one up and have ourselves a rodeo! Pompeii for Niggars! The lucky ones die instantly. The rest die a few seconds later. The remnants of the Petri dish dumped out cosmically, souls lost, vessels empty—dust. Particles roaming. Dropped. Dead. Sheth Jones’ classroom—his homeroom—decadent of loss. I know you think is meaningless but—is flowing. Lust. Amazon wetness—take a second look. These are the days we will remember, lost CJ wilderness the map we use to navigate the present moment. Present place being Dayton Ohio. A simple enough map. Poor people here. Rich people there. Black people here. White people there. Run the fractals and you’ll end up a speck of dust on a crack house floor in West Dayton—there aren’t that many paths. You can either be Sheth Jones from the West side (refusing to talk Black lingo and Black pronunciation) ending up a mother-lover living in Europe (the high-class artist lifestyle). Or you can end up a scab in the back room of a UD math class, casually learning algebra (this was me, hating every moment of it) looking out the window during testing wondering wondering wondering what the meaning of it is, where it all came from, who started everything. And safety existing in numbers—cows, all repeating—the deathly—dark and demon—dank, derelict classroom in an empty building. Urban exploration. GoPro Balthazar, bringing myrrh in a Tupperware container. Solitary. Oligarch. The assassination of an assassin bringing SpiritualLying™ to the masses. Dauntless. Massive. Masses. Of flesh. Of legs. Of arms. Of hair and shoulders. Of diminutive. Of reason. Of—progression. Of—progressives. That is the word we should shoulder. That is the word we should take. A fledgling cop studying math of all things in my first year at UD. My initiative year, me already being who I had become—so very much me but so very much not me—not developed yet not matured not gestated yet not grown. I had met Annabel by then—that part of my life was already in motion. By my first year at UD I had met her. Spent most of that first year in her dorm room fucking. She was my first. She was my first. We made loud noise in her bunk bed and downstairs her roomie was always getting it on with her girlfriend (if it’s right for me to say so).
If it’s right for me to say so many things. The beach in Ft Lauderdale always impressed me. They seemed to have things so right. So White. They seemed to have survived the civil rights movement intact. With the White parts in place and the Black parts in place right below them. With the Civil War parts in place. See, there’s been a drastic rearrangement of the Black pieces and the White pieces since the Civil War. Some places like Portland and New York have gotten the pieces in the wrong place. While places like Ft Lauderdale and Dayton have gotten them pretty much right. What do they do in countries where the phrase white makes right doesn’t rhyme? I know they don’t have problems with the darkies but somewhere in their past they must have—I don’t know—they must have—had a civil war. Or—an African conflict? England has darkies, right? I just don’t know. And I think it must be nice to be Black in Europa skies. On the sidelines of history! And I am so sure that there will never be a reign of Blacks in this world—so sure—that I loose them to run free in my country with no fear and every confidence. Without danger as long as they roam in their pen only! In their pen only. In the Negra paddock. With Negra shit and Negra foam! In the Negra Park maybe we can DNA-them-up with some zebra DNA and rid them of that eternal Blackness, rid them of that obsidian stone.
Sheth. Sheth Sheth Sheth. It’s too bad you were born Black. Too bad that the sweat glands of your current suit run Brown in color. Dyed the color of shit. Colored in the dyes of death or damnation, either way coming the spires of the cathedral flowing down in runs of blood it collects on the roof in gutter-spiked punch nugget Niggar it’s like the engine, engine starting up, engine making strides, engine running. Engine going good, going Black, going oil and Texas oil man. Bugging the wheels of the Oregon Trail. Ole El Myra. Ole Carolina. Ole dining car. Devastation of being free of alcohol = Absolut Absolutionist. Your entire race devastated by crack. Niggar gene, propagated through whatever rape and random fucking. Genes half-deep, programmed with the nature to kill. Jungle bunnies toting TEC-9s running up the ass of my neighborhood. Murderer instincts boiling up from the blood. Niggar = murder. Niggar = chaos. Niggar = blood. Glass and blood on the asphalt, sprayed like candy, knocked out of a kid’s mouth by a punch—crack!, split!—the apex of a hit! And here we come with the boom! boom! up the center of their biznaas, their business—their biznaas!
Make me the custodian of a park, give me the care of a White people, some children walking their dogs, flirting with the girl from up the street—if you give me that I’ll give you a clean block! It’s not my fault I fail! You didn’t give me a clean block. You gave me a park with crack cocaine—that was there before I got here! You gave me a block with children who murder their uncles (citing crack). With babies smoking that shit—I swear to god, they have crack, crack, crack laid out in the living room, four adults in the living room smoking crack, then in the kitchen here’s baby Smith or baby Jones taking it up the tongue with a spoon of crack, masking tape everywhere, baby taped to the high chair, a thin glass tubule going from the crack pipe to the baby’s lungs, creating for me such a mural to see that I will never see its like in my lifetime.