Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Canvas

I've been written on with invisible paint. Ever since I entered the auditorium of Northeastern University almost a decade ago to encounter a rainbow of breakdancers, graffiti writers, DJs and MCs in the purest essence of hip-hop, my soul was soaked in colored rain. It doesn't come off. It moves with me, as does the darkness of that Mos Def song that the selector blended through the record needle that day. That day was confirmation that I'm only a canvas. I have never written a thing. I have only been written on. Any creation thought to be mine is just my unique display of the hues splashed about and around me.

 Passive, not active.

 From the impressions of the Spanish songs my sun-kissed Afro Honduran grandmother would sing while swaying her hips to the elongated conversations with Thaione Davis in Dr Wax record store about music and more, I am the composition of others. The sculpture appears as a passing moment. As soon as you blink, your eyes open to a transformed work of art that is not the same as that which you shut your eyes to for less than a millisecond. That sculpture is you and I. Enthralled with Reflection Eternal's "Memories" as I stir strange thoughts on my keyboard, I reflect on how Talib Kweli made me a rapper as I received him into my canvas. Common is my fingers, Neil Young is my back, and my father is my courage. My granddad must make up my head, because any faint flashes of intelligence that I may have are blurred copies of his universal of brilliance. My aunt tells me so. Mother is my eccentricity, her father is my aesthetic sensuality, and her brothers and sister are my creativity. What else will I become? That is left to what else I experience. She writes inspiration on my heart with a feathered quill, drawing me as close while my reality tells me I'm distant. Bu what she said in code on my body makes me believe that when I lie alone she is there. The festival of San Joaquin will see me bring devotion to the Virgin in hopes that she would delete the space between us. Her united state is a handgun pointing to the West, squeezed by some entity that writes on my loins, "seek her" in the blood its bullets steal from my flesh . That is what the universe has stamped upon me. With no agency to resist, I am at peace that the canvas, my life, is in the best of small hands, and trust that the world's inscriptions upon me will blow my wandering self to her bosom, persuaded by the wind as it whispers my name darkly.

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