Experience

Today

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Paul. Medgar. Malcolm. Martin. Bodies of murder. Not all by the bullet. Hazel. Claudette. A day for one. A day for all. Slow death tames the loud and proud. They burried the living and laughed with them as they turned pages and cheeks. Mighty like Jehu. Zealous too. Lap the water with cuped hands and you keep your eyes open so that you don’t fall for the dream that sleeps with your unfaithful heart. That young man you see is that old man that sighs. Been here before. Been new. Been clean. Been old for sure. Been dead. Some die to live. Some love to death. And some tarry with the years they accumulate. Caesar takes his cut but no deals with black messiahs. Hoover up the Hamptons. Freddie’s dead as Curtis said. Been here before. Known the soil like they knew soul food. Like cotton. Like candy. Like us. We were sweet. We were lovers. She loved him dearly. Loved us to life. Dreams. That’s what it was. We were ideas. Not fixed. Not defined. We were possibilities for the pulled trigger to decipher. And bullets explore continents with names like Robeson. Evers. X. King. Scott. Colvin…….. ……… ………. ….. ……. ……… ….. …… …… ……. ……. …….. …….. ….. And years blow back to hunt the now before we wake with ideas to fix and define today.

Mothers & Daughters

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Blood is only as thick as the cake mix added and stirred with it. You can put blood in the spotlight but it won’t dance on command. The blood howls. Its lashes out. It bites. Its unruly. The splatter is our history. Maybe blood will not reconcile with blood. Maybe they will find sacred ground and tread lightly around the pain. At a distance they might greet cordially and in their small talk they might reveal things they will not explicitly say about how they feel. That cake mix is not going to hold together the fragility and mistrust. Time won’t cast lots and aspersions to see who surrenders a position of advantage on a Chess board. But a thousand words in a photograph knows all too well that it won’t matter in the end. Who was right? Who was wrong? Did she hold you firm? Did she kiss your cheek? Did she brush your hair as your helpless torso rested on her lap? Did she watch you crawl to her when she returned from work to a cold appartment shared with hangers on? An abode of drifters taking refuge with a half wanted child and a mother who stayed the course, when the river pulled at her hem. Mothers and daughters and the waters between them….

Painting by Piyali Muni

Miles

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

A complex beast is the capacity to make music that is more humane than we can sometimes be to each other. The horn plays the player as much as the player plays the horn. Francis might have been the miles of music he heard after she was gone. Do we always hurt the ones we love the most? And did that thought ever cross his mind?

Here in this candid moment we project the idea of him that is safest for us to hold. The totality of a life is not safe to hold. We are dangerous terrain and our journey to meet each other might be on an unpaved road. The sign says I Dare You. Travelling miles alongside you to discover a fraction of the universe that you are, is several lifetimes we will never live. But you can play Blue In Green. It will tell you something. Maybe enough to go down that unpaved road of the lover you uncoiled for.

Light

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Perhaps the light knew something I didn’t before I walked into studio C without a plan. Just loose ideas and the accumulation of years lived. The life I’ve been privileged to endure and delight in, tells on itself on such occasions as this one. Both sides of a coin put in a bid for what my heart subconsciously knows. I’m still learning to speak an old language.

Lady Luck

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Lady luck rides the train, we’ll meet on the overground, an octave below the humming that signals a new day. Arise with expectations to make new chapters with crayons and chalk.

Cheapest words are spent on most precious things, food for your thoughts is washed down with red wine for your fears.

Her imagined lover mutes his tongue and silence screams his adoration, even the trees hear his sighs and cover their ears, too loud and violent, a howling in the sly and murky wind. Long may she reign, a Queen of hearts who played the hands of time and chance.

I Can’t Find Your Name

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Paved in stone. Engraved. Embalmed. Footsteps trespass. Distress wont get it tonight. Blame the vain in you and your two headed horror of an attitude, lives beside lonely in the multiverse with mistress mirror tacked on. 

Tacky tactics with tactile execution, she blew me a kiss before I watched her die inside her laughter. A barbed wire mystery dressed to tease, concealed her pain with red lipstick, cuckold the prick of needles let loose on the needy old cock that crowed when she played her finest trick (you fell for it too).

Two whores in a harlot system governed by well dressed fear barely making it past the Pavilion cafe on stilts, throw curve balls when gun play is headed their way. And only one sees it. Swinging hard on her wave length he reaches out a hand to gently persuade tears out of her eyes. And she wonders who’s zooming who. 
Trespassing footsteps embalmed with the ointment of sorrows, loaned for a lifetime or a lunch hour, unforgiven by the debtor of dubious deeds who engraves tombstones of the soon to be forgotten and your name, not your handle on the matter at hand when light bends the truth. And love might yet find it.

November 2nd

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

“And In the half light, see me as I am” – Jeff Buckley, Opened Once

November 2nd came close to her door. Too close. Stood in front of it for a heartbeat and watched the years fade away. There was no welcome parade in the sky above. The stars hadn’t arrived yet to light my way back to insignificance. Just the black on black of an Autumn night. I was back there again. Inside on the outside. She was inside me again. Behind the fortified wall built by muscular fears lay remnants of our transient lives lost in the fire where we danced the Kamikaze Waltz with our dreams and nightmares bound as one. Memories.

Tell me I got it all wrong. I won’t deny it. Naivety shrouds the slow development of cynicism, but I was guilty from the womb, cause it was those same infantile tears I cried when you closed that last chapter of our story. I was your open book but somehow the plot and character development got too heavy to make sense of. Stunted growth or premature maturity, I couldn’t tell. I mean love was all I knew back then. That silly love that some men and women try to hide from, lest it be taken for weakness or granted. I couldn’t hold it in. When that water rises up from the deep, it takes down all in its path like a rapture with contempt. It must have been scary for you to have to contend with that brazen, cavalier young man, though you loved me too even when it manifested in the most self destructive way. Pushing me to despise you was an exercise in vain. I couldn’t turn away.

I think I understand it now. You had to escape my love. You would never have survived it. To be loved the way I loved you would have cost you your identity and anonymity, because as Baldwin said, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” So you chose to remain a mystery, and kept me on the leash of your shadow. My best friend and a stranger. I embraced the mystery and all that volatile beauty that came in the package of your body, mind and soul. That’s what you were to me. Beautiful. And I was right there for all that pain that kept you a prisoner of your secrets, though I couldn’t heal you with words or kisses. Like you, I was a wounded creature on insecurity highway. With the blood flowing I still found cold comfort in your touch. With your lips you ushered me into your labyrinth world and left me with hand me down hopes of a future together. The same hands that gripped my back would cast me back to the poverty of your absence from my life on that Rocket ship that Stevie sang of. And when you offered me your precious temple without regard for its value, you might remember that I made it clear that I couldn’t afford your “spoilt goods”. You were more valuable to me than any ambition I could conjure up in the folly and virility of my youth. You were all those nights of dreaming, and praying, and longing which turned into years. We were lovers before we ever were. You knew that too. We were the half of each other. We were the unspoken words in a glance across tables of chattering friends and escalators on opposite sides. We were the solace in a momentary embrace which felt like a lifetime. And when we held each other, when we rolled in that roller coaster of emotional chaos, that took on various forms of passive and reactive aggression all the way round, I saw you hiding in there. I saw you naked in the dark. Did you know that? I saw you as you were in true likeness and I knew that I would always love you.

For Victoria (Wherever you are)

A Refrain

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Tomorrow will not be a work in progress before a refrain,
(before) the rain settles, and snow falls,
and they raise a hand to strike my cheek or wipe my
brow. I hold the pearl in my eye (the other hand), and
plant the seed of graceful song, and rub the soil
between soft palms (when we see eye to I), before
lost trains of thought, we wore our best years at a
distant glance, and thought we’d meet on Andalusian
hills, to dine with dreams we didn’t make, to share
stories we haven’t lived, and paint pictures we could
scarcely imagine.

Tomorrow will not be an excuse for today’s unfinished
business, talkin’ bout how good it feels to get another
chance at life’s poker table, to play your five
stringed instrument, like a child making three special
wishes by a fountain, with your lungs pumped full of
hot air, and the mercy of the wind at the back of your
neck, to dabble again, and maybe with a little lady
luck, razzle, dazzle a fortune born of sweat beads and
high blood pressure, and fly you away on a ready made
bed of thornless roses, with a song in mind for when
you cross over, hoping that the hill won’t roll over,
when tomorrow strikes you and your waterfall
resolutions, slippery, just as quickly, money like
water trickles through fingers, pressed together,
pockets shut tighter than fists, breath held longer
than destiny’s late shifts, but you don’t feel much
younger than first love, now dare you ask older,
wiser, brother, sister, friend in disguise, what the
wind behind your back is saying, when she ain’t
blowing you away. The voice I hear says, “What you
don’t do today will not deliver you tomorrow”, as
surely as one day bears no resemblance with another.
Tomorrow will be decided today.

Small Death

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Mother tongue is cool, and you can be the conscience of my indiscretion, or the remedy that triggers a poet’s latent talent out of the comfort zone and complacency of a reclining chair. Dormant, but not dead. Though he used to die a small death everyday, he thinks it would be best to live a lot, stop the rot from dot to dot like her heart forgot to die again today. And now we come to you and I, and now we wonder how and why? Wondering how high…is the drop? How long…till it stops? Its not the pain that troubles you, cause death serves a purpose of its own agenda, though I’d sooner be a warning sign for danger than the fool that got in the way of a stranger called Providence. And if it bites like last winter, and sister warm blood tastes better, then you should know that the fraud will be the block buster ’till further notice, but notice how your past reminds you of how far away your future cast you, drawing doodles with your minds eye, can’t see too well with your past life, and dearly beloved is a dwelling place for the restless, rowdy like premature ambition, a mission statement wears your age with contempt, crowded with sentiment on insecurity highway, down below, the parched valley raises up another question mark to consider in cubic shapes of monochrome colour, yeah underneath that red Sun, rising to fall, waking to sleep through fog, the distance, the drift, and your wondering how high is the summit of your desire, to climb back up from your small death, on the string of the loose change that barren land loaned you, the countless grains of Sahara’s sand timer tickles the unfancied soles of your feet into motion, defeats stagnation, anticipates the storm, marches on like the aftermath of the Somme, but will not carry the dead on depressed shoulders, and empty stomach.