Roads that led to the land of providence

Noble have I created thee.

[roadstoprovidence]

#godmademequeer

[roadstoprovidence]

BC says he has been talking to people.

He takes several little pills a day.

The blue ones give him energy, it's a study.

The other blue ones are suppose to make him happy.

The white ones affect the protease inhibitors, keep his viral load at bay, and his t-cells up and running.

I tell BC me too.

He asks how long and when, but never who or how.

-Excerpt from “God Made Me Queer” a dance-theatre work by r.lewis

photo credit - mer sio

[roadstoprovidence]

1.Listen to Beyonce. Beyonce has all the confidence you need.

2. Thumb a Salinger book, maybe it might hold your interest, maybe it might     help youforget.

3. Shower. 

4. Second guess yourself. Second guess yourself. 

5. Leave for the party cuz ultimately you want to be affirmed, and someone touchingyou for better or for ill affirms you. 

 -God Made Me Queer. A new dance theatre work by r.lewis

[roadstoprovidence]

"We sit together at the front of the double decker bus, feet sometimes touching the panoramic glass walled before us. 

The concrete buildings, and the concrete walls of i­95 in New England running backwards as we move forward. His pale hands rapidly winding themselves around two needles, knitting fabric. I fall asleep somewhere after taking pictures of his dexterous hands, and a series of out­ of ­focused streetlights in the rain. 

He makes transience not seem that bad ­­maybe because he knows magic or connection, honesty, God or whatever it is that makes people kind and creative. The still small voice. 

In New York City there is drizzle. I wake up somewhere in Harlem to nighttime walkers darting through streets from stores, subway entrances, cars, and taxis. 

The capitalism of New York is like concentrated orange juice. It becomes diluted as normal, as water, as it moves across the continent of North America. 

New York, cuz I needed a queer Jesus. New York, cuz I needed dark skinned Jesus. New York, cuz wrestling is constant. New York, cuz here I cannot avoid my humanity, my graces, or my fuck­ups. 

He and I get off our bus and walk into a McDonalds ten blocks from Times Square. I order to go. 

We walk to the subway and I ingest, in a car, on the G line, a cocktail of HIV meds, fries, and one of those fish sandwiches that my best friend swears makes pee smell like fish. I used to agree with her ­­six pills in all. We arrive at ze's apartment and fall asleep." -God Made Me Queer a new work by r.lewis

photographs: mer sio

[roadstoprovidence]

Why #Blacklivesmatter

R. Lewis

Over the past year or so the legalized murder of Black people in the United States by law enforcement and “security” agents has become a part of mainstream dialogue. These conversations have been surrounded by direct actions and protests throughout the fifty states and around the world. #Blacklivesmatter has become a linking thread between protests/actions and online forums. It has appeared on news articles, and picket signs. It has become the symbol of a war that has been ongoing since Portuguese and British sailors surveyed the coast of Africa looking for new trade routes to Asia in the 15th century. This symbol of resistance, however, has been under assault largely by White individuals or individuals who believe they have some stake in Whiteness (a culture, not a skin tone), who exclaim #alllivesmatter. This is not only insulting to Black life in the United States, but is a statement tinged with psychological violence.

The disproportionate levels of poverty, and incarceration, hegemonic educational standards, discriminatory labor and housing practices that Black people are collectively experiencing and witnessing are related to six centuries of European industrialism, and colonialism. Many scholars would argue that if it were not for the six centuries of slavery which occurred in the West, both Europe and The United States would not be the world “leaders” that they are today. The very infrastructure of cities in the United States, its roads, antique homes, and buildings, were often built by Black slaves. The food of the 15th through the end of the 19th centuries, from sugar, to rice, to the cotton that was spun into fabrics at Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) started out as raw goods harvested by, slaves.

After 1865, states made it difficult for free Black people to participate in civil-political discourses where they could most affect change for their communities. (Have you seen Oprah’s scene in Selma? Heartbreaking!) Black people faced a host of barriers in regards to voting until the Voter Right’s Act of 1965. This means Black people in the United States have collectively had a secure right to vote for about as long as our parents have been alive. For some of us it’s maybe our grandparents, but either way we’re talking 50 years. This is important to recognize because it means out of 239 years of the United States’ existence, Black people have been granted some of the rights White people have for only about 25% of the country’s official existence.

From this vantage point it’s easy to see the United States is a country built by White people for White people. This is significant to acknowledge if we say we truly believe in and are working towards equality. The very history of this country says Black lives don’t matter. There are policies both cultural and political that are working to annihilate Black life. Make no mistake. We are at war. #Blacklivesmatter is not only a symbol, but a bold radical declaration to a system built and sustained on the exploitation of yes, human life, but disproportionately Black and Brown life. We can turn on the tv, watch a movie, open any newspaper, go to many secondary school history classrooms, and find that Whiteness is something that is of import, that “in effect matters.” But how is that helping to fix the problems created by Whiteness, (colonialism, slavery, sexism, apartheid, segregation, capitalism, abuse of natural resources) and its influence of life in the West, and as the 21st century moves forward, the world.

[roadstoprovidence]

One set of my 2nd great grandparents. Venie (1884) and Randal Williams(1877). Venie was born on an island somewhere. Randal was born in Georgia. Our familiy lore says that Venie was working for a White family when she met my great great grandfather. The White patriarch didn't want to release my great great grandmother from her servitude, so Randal worked and saved up money in Georgia, went back to the Island, got Venie who was pregnant and they fled back to Georgia, where they owned their own home and land eventually, and farmed. Venie was a seamstress and drove a model T. They eventually settled in Putnam County Florida, where their descendants ran shit "by any means necessary" in the city of Belglade, Florida.

[roadstoprovidence]

I'm starting a series of poems about my ancestors. This is the headstone and death record of my great great great grandmother Jennie Grant Brown. 1822-1922.

[roadstoprovidence]

Stop forgetting.

When the trepidation, worrying, and fear subsides, I look beneath my feet and find they are anchored to a rock. How soon I forget what I am fastened to, what I am swimming in. 

[roadstoprovidence]

Excerpt from God Made Me Queer: an orthodox dispensation on roving.

...I ask if I can crash with him sometime during my stay in the city.   

He says yes. 

I ask BC to come with me on an adventure in the city. 

He says he'll see, and then tells me about a problem. 

Depression: I'm sure I've had bouts of it. My family doesn't handle conversations about mental health well, so I never felt I could talk about sadness. I can't talk about my sadness.  God was... is a prescription for sadness. Like slavery, like sharecropping, like holocaust,  God saying so can strengthen the victim, but also creates power structures. 

God says so -- the answer Christian families have to many of the questions their kids have about Ellen, Rosie, abortion, gender, sex, womanhood, capitalism, radicalism, liberation, freedom, existence and suffering.  

God says so is code for the dysfunction that we lack the language to name; our society, our norms, our prescriptions -- they ask for dysfunction. 

 The problem is empires, like dollars just change hands.  

 Reasons for depression: 

   Corporeal punishment experienced as a child 

   Spiritual abuse 

   The gender binary 

   My father was never a dad 

   Being poor 

   Being a poor person of color 

   Being a queer poor person of color 

   My parents had drug and alcohol problems. 

   My parents were likely depressed 

   My mother was murdered.  

  Cause of death: Traumatic head injury caused by blunt force. They     cut off her head to do the autopsy. 

  All of these things are connected in someway to colonialism. 

 BC says he has been talking to people. 

He takes several little pills a day. 

The blue ones give him energy, it's a study. 

The other blue ones are suppose to make him happy. 

The white ones affect the protease inhibitors and keep his viral load at bay and his t-cells up and running. 

I tell BC me too. He asks how long and when, but never who or how. 

I ask how long and when, but never who or how. 

We talk about our studies.  

[revolutionary-mindset]

[roadstoprovidence]

City, a piece.

City: A Piece. 

First, a fort, sitting on a mountain destined to be conquered by the maker of its fortification, its bricks, its muds, its first pieces.  

  And we saw the faces 

And we heard  the voices 

And I was invisible, next to you like reflection,  you waiting. waiting. waiting for breath  

  Waiting for Holy, Holy, Holy, like dry dust kissing air as rain inserts itself into the flesh of earth.  

  Settled, you call me partner,  

Your hand on my hips,  

my hands around your neck. 

We've been dancing like this for quite some time.    

  Your face expansive as newborn, as sprout, as potential.  

Your breathe instruction, like code.  

  And we heard  

And we saw      

  And  

          We listened, our steps dancing so much wonder our eyes forgot what sight was,   

        finding movement by your heart beating, paths by your blood flowing.  

  We listened and we knew how to be still.  

  (To quietly rock and sway to instructions coursing through our lungs and hearts and veins.)  

  We listened like a hunter in winter waiting on its prey, like a pianist fingering a note for but an instant 

We listened.  

  And we knew the transmutable faces of the Cosmic God  

of pre-birth,  of when the dimensions were first marked, the stars hung, the second before the bang,  

  Do you remember? 

  It's time to remember. 

[roadstoprovidence]

A poem for Nana

Nana catches fish, like her ancestors who stood in tiny boats in the still canals  of the southeast. Nana catches fish, arms stretched out over stillness...  like your hands

Nana catches fish in the bright Florida sun, the same star her ancestors soaked in, brown, bronze, black skin.

  Nana catches fish for food like Jesus, turns decay into mud, into something new.

Like Jesus, nana walked miles on the sidewalk, her pace sometime panic and quick, but confident as a tiger, a grown black woman, a proud black woman.

The day Nana’s body finished it’s decay her constellation exploded, she became a brilliant dwarf on the divine string of stars that necklace the sky.For you so loved the cosmos, and  began a new work and breathed a thing called life.

[roadstoprovidence]

Arriving to Histories.

I arrived in Jacksonville at 1:30 in the morning.

I arrived in Florida asleep.

I don’t remember crossing the Florida Georgia line.

  It’s a fictional line anyway.

  As cliché as this may sound, it is a line that you don’t see from space.

Really. It doesn’t exist.

The North American continent just juts a bit of itself into those bodies of water named by some White man “The Atlantic,” and by another “The Gulf of Mexico.”

  Histories:

  The history of Florida is an interesting one. Florida didn’t become a part of the colonial power that is the United States until the 1800’s. Before then it was largely a territory of colonial Spain, and for a spell Colonial Britain. The Spanish used Florida as a buffer from the British and U.S. colonial powers and it was largely unpopulated by Europeans through out the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries; First Nation peoples however largely populated it.

  The Timucua were one such indigenous peoples, and inhabited the region that became Jacksonville down to Central Florida. They were murdered, massacred, annihilated by a man named Hernando De Soto, a conquistador, in the 16th century.

  Later on members who were banished or fleeing the Muscogee/Creek nation came to the peninsula that would become Florida throughout the 18th century. They absorbed the remaining indigenous peoples in the peninsula, and became the Seminole/Creek peoples.

  This is where one of my histories begins.

  To the east of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, are Islands known as Barrier Islands. During the times of chattel slavery these islands in South Carolina and Georgia were used for the harvesting of rice, Sea Island cotton, and indigo, by means of slave labor.

  This is where another of my histories begins.

  My ancestors who were enslaved in South Carolina at this time were in a unique situation.

Europeans didn’t have immunity to mosquito/malaria borne illnesses and would leave my ancestors on the barrier islands to harvest rice, Sea Island cotton, and indigo.

  Because my ancestors lived in relative isolation away from Europeans they were able to hold on to much of their African culture.

  They blended the languages of many African peoples and created a culture and language known as Gullah/Geechee.

  The epicenter of this culture is in South Carolina and it spreads north to Jacksonville, North Carolina, and as far south as Jacksonville, Fl, moving south like a small narrowing stream to St. Andros Island in the Bahamas.

  My maternal grandfathers name was Gus Colleton. He was born sometime in the 1930’s in Walterboro South Carolina. When my grandmother Curly speaks of him she says that he “spoke funny cause he was a Geechee.”

  Many of the Gullah/Geechee people have been discriminated against because of the creole language they speak. They have been told for generations that they “talk funny” and “speak English improperly”. This has been magnified by the secondary education system in the U.S. where Gullah/Geechee kids especially in past generations are forced to switch codes (a linguistic term) in order to participate and have their intellect affirmed by dominant White culture that dictates what is acceptable in these institutions. Those that can’t or don’t are doomed to be outcasts of and seen as failures by the dominant White institution of secondary education in the U.S.

  This hasn’t been my experience. This is because in the 1950’s my mother’s family assimilated to dominant White ideologies via the colonial tool of missionary work known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  This is one of my histories.

  Before my family became Jehovah’s Witnesses, my great grandmother signed her name as X, and my grandmother didn’t graduate high school. She got  her G.E.D. until later on in life.  They were from the “country” in Southern Florida.

  I say that my family assimilated to dominant White ideologies because, while my family can make some bangin baked mac and cheese, bread pudding, and collard greens, has an affinity for chitlins, knows how to braid hair, is stocked up on coco butter, oil sheen, and hair grease, my families religious beliefs were born out of the religious White fundamentalism that swept across The United States at the turn of the 20th century.

  These beliefs keep my family isolated from the black community that surrounds them and keeps them subscribed to some pretty antiquated White standards of normativity.  I say this because for centuries the heart of the black community has been the black church, and for the past 64 years my mothers family has been largely disconnected from that space. Nothing about my family’s religious practices resembles those of what happens in many black churches.

  Growing up Gospel music was actually forbidden in our house, it was replaced by stuffy sounding 20th century European influenced chorale arrangements, that remind me more of cultish elevator music, than the moving Holy Ghost that fills the pews of the black church when black choirs lift up their voices with belting vibrato. 

  There was a strict code of dress, I was never allowed to have my hair longer than an inch as child, rap music was out of the question, and one of my aunts did everything that she could to ensure that the word ain’t was not apart of my vocabulary.

  With this moral code combined with isolation from black folk that were not Jehovah’s Witnesses came a superiority complex and a fear of the black community that surrounded us.

  My family lacks the critical lens to view a lot of the hardships that many folks who don’t have the privilege of literacy face within the black community because everything is filtered through the White lens of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  While my mother’s family has faced racism and hardships, they have rarely participated, to my knowledge in many of the actions and movements that have occurred in the black community. They leave these things as their “church” tells them in the hands of Jehovah.

  This inaction and ideology of assimilation has been detrimental in some ways to the development of Black Consciousness within my own being, and has given me a lot of traumatic shit to work out and through over the years, however because of this assimilation, I was able to read English by age four primarily so that I could read bible stories.

  I’ve always been super queer, and for the most part my mom’s family turns a blind eye to this.  The conservative overwhelmingly Christian culture of Jacksonville, both black and white however did not.

  I was taunted a lot by my peers in public and private school growing up. The white kids taunted me because of class differences (which is an inherently racist notion in itself) the black kids taunted me because of my literacy with English and my queerness. I was always told by black folk down here that either I talked “White” or “Proper.” These comments angered me as a kid, and fed into the racism and superiority that my family’s colonial religion taught me. (I knew that I was black, I just wasn’t “ghetto”, and reasoned at the time that it was wrong to be “ghetto.”)

  During my high school years, I went to an arts school and cultivated a majority of white friends because many of them were queer or were raised in White liberal environments where they were taught that a person’s sexuality didn’t matter and wasn’t cause for discrimination. While this was healthy in a number of ways, and provided many outlets for connection, commonality and expression, it also served to fuel the suppression of my own Black Consciousness and Identity.  It in essence furthered my family’s practice of assimilation to White American ideals.  

  Another History:

  Abuse is a word that is so deeply intertwined in the Black experience. Black people are assaulted, physically by cops, and the oppressive forces of capitalism, spiritually by churches that promote respectability politics that only reinforce White supremacy, and psychologically by institutions such as school and work places that don’t acknowledge cultural differences and the fact that the Americana has largely been influenced and molded by Euro-centric culture and thought. I have faced these abuses on a systemic level and so has my family. It is important for me to frame what I am about to share next with that in mind.

  In my family there is a history of the physical abuse of children.

This happens for a myriad of reasons, but mainly I think it’s cause black folks are scared for their black children and the abuse that they may face if they don’t conform and respect the system of the U.S, which is steeped in White Supremacy.

I believe that this abuse entered my family through the channel of slavery at some point, as a lot of black families have similar stories.

  So my great great grandmother would strip her children butt naked, tie them to trees and whip them. My great grandmother would strip my grandmother place a pillow on her head and whip her, my grandmother in turn would whip her children, though she never tied them to trees or placed pillows on their head, she did whip their naked skin with skinned switches, electrical cords, and curtain rods.

  I did not escape this abuse. 

  These whippings, or beatings as they were often called were enacted whenever children “misbehaved”, this category could include telling a lie, not doing a chore, having a disorderly room, getting a bad grade on report card, misbehaving in school, “talking back”, or masturbating.

  Combined with periods of the isolation of being home schooled in my teen years, and the physical abuse I experienced, I started cutting myself, and contemplated running away many times.

  Finally, I reached out to random strangers via the telephone in my teen years in search of help.

  One stranger was a woman by the name of Crystal. Crystal’s grandparents; a world war two veteran from Illinois and a British immigrant who had a knack for astrology started a local bookstore in Jacksonville that closed some years ago. Crystal worked there and would talk to me on the phone during the period in which I was home schooled and isolated from most people except my family.

  I called her family’s bookstore one time looking for information, Crystal told me to come in, I told her I couldn’t, she asked why, and I told her everything. We’ve been best friends, more like family ever since.

  Over the past fifteen years Crystals family has become family to me. I crash with them when I’m in town, and they have always been helpful in giving me space, or a listening ear when I am trying to make sense of my life.  They have always been there for me, despite whatever racial, class, or lifestyle differences that exist between us.

  We are pretty open with each other.

  Crystal and her parents picked me up at the Greyhound station at 1:30 in the morning when I arrived in Jacksonville that night. 

[roadstoprovidence]

Travel and Targets

Travel and Targets.

  I got up early the next day and made sure that everything was ready for my 8:30 boarding of a greyhound bus.

  I like traveling Greyhound when I go home to Florida, cause it feels more like a pilgrimage.

It is a pilgrimage down Interstate-95. It’s the way that I arrived in Rhode Island eight years ago. Well kind of. I drove up with a caravan of folks, over two days or so, but there is something about the day and a half to two day journey via bus or car that gives my brain time to process, time to prepare, time to be still before being thrown into the culture shock of my home and the beauty of my friends, and the getting to know my family as the person I’ve become away from my native land.

  The Greyhound bus was late arriving into Kennedy Plaza. It had driven down Interstate 95 from Boston and arrived in Providence approximately forty five minutes after the time it was due getting there.  We left Providence at 9:30

  Greyhound is a fragile system.

Like most systems of travel if one thing goes out of wack, it is possible for a shit ton more to go out of wack.

By a shit ton more, I mean connecting busses.

This pilgrimage usually works by way of Providence to New York (Transfer)

New York to Richmond (Transfer)

Richmond to Fayetteville (Transfer)

Fayetteville to Jacksonville (Arrival)

  This time however, due to the bus driver’s (a man with a coffee Cremora complexion who spoke spanish) schedule running late (it always ran late according to him) I arrived in New York at 5:30 two and a half hours after the time I was suppose to arrive, and two hours after my connecting bus to Virginia had already left.

  I went to the Greyhound booth on the bottom floor of The Port Authority, and waited in line with all the other disgruntled passengers to find out what I should do about my missed connection. An old woman in front of me who was heading to Richmond, and spoke to another employee was immediately ushered to a bus that was leaving. Two more people took about twenty minutes for their problems to get figured out.

  The guy in front of me was headed to Nebraska, and found out that he would be arriving a day later than he anticipated, he protested but after the attendant persisted that there was nothing he could do, the guy relented with a withdrawn look on his face.

  When it was my turn, the attendant after typing and clicking for what seemed like a frenzied eternity printed me a ticket telling me that I would arrive in Jacksonville at 1:30 am. I protested, but he told me that I was lucky to be arriving then, and that my only other option was to get on another bus at 10:30 am the next day. I said thank you took the ticket for the 1:30 am arrival and walked away.

  After being on a Greyhound for eight hours, I was hungry, and had noticed a dollar pizza place on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fortieth St. 

I walked to it. Got two slices, ate and called my friend B.C.

  We made plans to meet up at some point in the evening.

  After my phone call with him someone asked me for a dollar to get a slice of pizza, I said no… I honestly didn’t have it. Homeless poor folk trouble me. Not in away that is shrouded in annoyance towards them, but annoyance at myself that I don’t have the tools to fix their problems. I realize a lot of the complexities of homelessness and poverty, and how these issues arise from the enormous flaws of the capitalist empire in which we are all forced to participate in. It depresses me.

  Why should folks have to work for food, or shelter, or clothes or education, or to have a sustainable life. No one asked to fucking be here.

  I know that one of the counter points to these answers is that life is a blessing, that life is a gift, and I’m sure it can be if you are afforded a lifestyle that can keep you oblivious to the inequalities of our world, if you can drive on highways and see cities only from that vantage point.

  New York must be amazing from the vantage point of taxis… Wait New York is amazing from the vantage point of taxis.  I’ve done it. No one asks you for a dollar, not even the driver. A digital display says how much you pay, and that is that.  The homeless an poor become a blur, they blend in with all the other pedestrians of the city.

  So back to my point no one asked to be here, and there is enough land, enough food, enough of us that we could actually live sustainable lives in which everyone’s necessities were met without capitalism. I truly believe this. Major adjustments would have to be made, but we can fucking do it.

  We can do it.

  So, back to the story, after I said that I didn’t have a dollar to give to the guy who asked for it, I watched him ask a white man in a business suit for what I assume was a dollar. The suit looked annoyed, and as though he desperately wanted to cross the street, though he was prohibited by the buzzing traffic of Fortieth St.

  I walked to a fast food joint ordered a dollar coffee (it’s seriously all I could afford. I had 8 dollars in my bank account, and I’m not ashamed that I only had eight dollars, I am ashamed that I reasoned that it was okay to buy a dollar coffee from an establishment that operates on the wage slave model of employment.) I am, was complicit in contributing funds so that those brown and black workers could have a job that pays them less than what they are worth, and that is something to be ashamed of.

  A woman dressed in attire that said she was middle class came in with a receipt and complained about the quality of service or food that she had. She never raised her voice above a whisper, however another woman dressed in attire that said she was working class or impoverished came in to air a complaint and didn’t seem to be listened to. She met the shrugging shoulders and closed ears with fuck y’alls and fuck this.

  I said amen, looked at the time and realized BC wasn’t coming, walked back to the bus station as it was getting close to my departure time, took some drags of my one hitter, boarded the bus, and fell asleep as New York City, and the north country became zippered into the night behind me.

  Delaware: Half hour rest stop and food before day in the morning.

  Richmond: Arrival before sunset. We crossed the Mason Dixon line, Greyhound’s passengers became a disproportionate sea of brown and black faces.

  I try to change my ticket to a direct ride to Jacksonville because the bus I was connecting to in Richmond was doing just that.

The bus driver said no and that I must follow the instructions on my ticket.

  His supervisor said yes but doesn’t issue me a new ticket.

  Fayetteville:  Everyone reboards the bus but me. The bus driver, a black man, with an authoritarian complex tells me “I thought incorrectly,” and that I am not reboarding his bus and must follow the instructions on the ticket.

  Dick!

  The instructions on my ticket have me stopping in several small towns/cities in South Carolina.

  This is cool cause I get to see South Carolina, this is not cool because there isn’t much to see in South Carolina, or so I think.

  Our first stop after leaving Fayetteville North Carolina is in Florence South Carolina.

Florence seems like the kinda place that is analogous to a pin drop, a pin point, a place that hasn’t changed much in the last fifty years or so.

  I go to a field off the bus stations property and take a toke, when I return I see an Asian guy smoking an e- device. We smirk at each other.

I reboard the bus, and notice some white jacked dude who reminds me of a mixture of Tom Finland and Joe Manganiello.

  Sex.

  I take my seat and sit back just as he boards the bus, and heads directly to the back.

Behind me, on the right side of the bus is a Latin kid no older than twenty-two or so. He is sitting back listening to his headphones.

   The sexy Tom Finland Joe Manganiello look alike is trailing his way to the front of the bus and has taken a police badge out of his shirt.

  Not sexy.

  He pauses at the Latin kid’s seat and begins interrogating him for what seems like an eternity. My heart races!

  “Do you speak English?”

“Where are you going?”

“Where is home?”

“We are looking for weapons, are you from here?”

  His questions fire at the Latin kid like an M16 meeting a supposed terrorist, his hands pilfer and pat down the Latin kid’s belongings in the over head compartment.

  “This isn’t right.” I think to myself, but what can I do, my breath probably smells like ganja, I have a gram or less of Mary Jane on my person and three smoking devices, not even enough to be fined in Rhode Island, but in South Carolina combined with my blackness enough to probably get me arrested and locked up on several charges for God only knows how long.

  I must do something I decide, (I’ve never seen any shit like this happen before and I’ve rode Greyhound busses numerous times) and then I notice that the Tom Finland Joe Manganiello look alike has a partner who has boarded the bus and is searching the other overhead compartments.

  I must do something. Jesus would do something. Jesus wants me to do something.

  I decide that all I can do is stare at the guy harassing the Latin kid, I decide this because I think it’s important for the pig to know that folks are watching him, the universe is watching him and his abusive racist ass. I decide to do this because solidarity with the Latin kid is more important than worrying about if my ass is gonna get locked up.

  Before I do this I try to make myself look as White as possible.  I open my book bag, take out my laptop and open up an essay.  Language.  It’s all the privilege I have.

  Staring works.

  The pig notices me, walks towards me and asks what I am looking at.

  In my Whitest, gayest voice, I reply that I am just trying to figure out what is going on.

He says that they are looking for weapons, and then asks me where I am going.

  I give him the Whitest performance I can, with direct eye contact.

Thank God for all that sales experience and all those theatre lessons.  

He seems caught off guard.

  He leaves me alone, but then his buddy comes to interrogate me, and asks if the Tom Finland  Joe Manganiello pig talked to me. I say yes. He asks me what he said.

I parrot our conversation.

  He looks dismayed and walks away.

  I sigh, the bus driver boards the bus, starts it and we leave the racist hell hole of Florence South Carolina.

  I look at the Latin kid, whose eyes are now closed. He seems lost in his headphones, or a prayer.

  I close my eyes and drift, praying that I get to Jacksonville without incident.

  Welcome to the South.

  Welcome to having brown or black skin in the South.

[roadstoprovidence]

Where Armories and Parks Meet.

The day before I left was Sunday. I had been thinking about the massacre of the Palestinian people, which had been intensifying, deaths rising to at least one, thousand, nine, hundred, people at the time of this writing,. So that day was Sunday, and I was on a bike, and they was on a skateboard. Hours before I arrived at their house in need of return, in need of certainty, conviction that what was going on in Palestine was not some God sanctioned event.

I needed to know that God loved the Palestinians, more than God loves the sparrows, that God is attentive to every hair upon each persons head in Gaza, that God knows the deaths, one, thousand, nine, hundred, people and counting at the time of this writing, I needed to know that God felt each wound, each child’s intestines ripped from their belly, each sisters mutilated face, every Christian crushed by a building, the soul of every Muslim, Jew, Atheist and other that lived in Gaza, and knew like a creator should know, the ache of loss, the ache of separation, of fucking distance you didn’t want, but for some God damned reason had to be.

I needed to know that God loves Jews just as much as God loves goyim.

So that day was Sunday, and before I was on a bike, and they was on a skateboard, I called them, and told them that I needed to escape my psyche, because the noise of Israel’s bombs were too loud for it, and I couldn’t hear the still small voice anymore, and a lot of my Christian mentors were speaking blasphemy, upholding a book of translations over one, thousand, nine, hundred, human likenesses and counting at the time of this writing. I don’t understand how that could ever be what heaven on earth looks like. I don’t understand how that is a part of God’s revolution, plan, story, narrative. I don’t understand how theology works in its entirety, nor do I really care, all I care about is what happens to things that are clothed with actual flesh and blood.

So that Sunday, we ingested mushrooms in a house on the West End of Providence, a house that was built in the 19th century, yet had Gothic style hallways, and comfortable sized bedrooms, but was kinda punked the fuck out, with writing on its refrigerator, flies buzzing around the kitchen, dishes in the sink, dust on the floor, but ok bathrooms? This was the kinda space where you could grow, like mushrooms, like trees, like a garden overtaking a city looking like a commonwealth made of earth, a city on a hill, a capitol of heaven.

And it was.

The mushrooms kicked in about 20 minutes after we took them. We decided to go to Roger Williams Park. Roger Williams Park is named after the founder of Rhode Island, a white man who like most white men of his time committed to some arguably reprehensible things, and ideas, but then comes the question of who hasn’t? Who hasn’t missed the mark? I think we all do, even the people who think that they get it right, or say that they do. I think it is human to miss targets or objectives of life. I believe in walking through a sea of grace, of forward progression, of even so still…

So Roger believed in a brand of religious freedom, and his specific understanding of scripture was branded heretical by protestant Massachusetts, and Roger fled to the land of a First Nations People, upon setting his sight on what is present day Providence, felt that he had indeed found providence, and that is how the city got its name sake.

Cute.

Roger professed a faith in Jesus, (in a being that claimed to be the totality of known and unknown existence, God incarnate, totality of existence known and unknown becoming flesh and blood, totality of existence willing itself sacrifice before life ever began,)but Roger also upheld a worldview that said not all human life matters, that we are not all covered in the same flesh and blood.

Roger missed objectives.

And I do too.

Halfway to Roger Williams Park the mushrooms set in, and we felt infinite, the veil broke, I saw creations heart beating, life breathing, oneness, with them behind me on a skateboard while biking.

Then I realized how far it was to the colonial inspired park, with it’s gardens and grandeur.

I realized that biking and skate boarding while tripping and going the distance we were going were not in agreement with one another. The vibration of my bike on the road was unexpected. They couldn’t skate that fast, the cars were fast and big; creation too beautiful to not stop and speak with.

I stopped.

They stopped.

We decided to return to the small park near the old Armory building.

At first sight of the Armory, we rejoiced, for we weren’t lost,

We rejoiced because we were close to the park. I rejoiced because I had to pee and I could as soon as I found a place out of sight on the building.

We got closer to the Armory and they said, “I don’t like the Armory,” as we walked beneath its towering orange-yellow bricks. I said, “I don’t like it either.” I looked up at it’s castle like fortifications, then I remembered being in Somerville a month earlier, with you and you telling me that Armories were built throughout the U.S. in the 21st century to store ammunition for war.

I told them this.

And we saw the darkness.

We saw humans who were mighty warriors before the Lord, the ones that bled existence with metal, we saw humans who were mighty warriors before the Lord, the ones who in all their pain, their disbelief, heard the call of the Caesars and bowed, and honored the request to snuff out the life of those who stand in the way of empire, its tractors paving over simple life for its unconscious technologies rooted in colonialism, crafted to enrich the lives of a few and not all.

We saw humans who were mighty warriors before the Lord, the ones who confused their might, agility, cunning, skill, for something that was meant to build towers and banks, and nations which vie to replace the face of the Lord.

And we saw the darkness, and I peed on the Armory praying that my urine would somehow rust its memory, its hold, its false narratives.

And they went somewhere in the depths and I found them under a tree in the shade after I peed, and we walked to another tree that had flowered. A tree that was further from the Armory.

The holiness of the moment quaked our insides, the awe of the hand of creation, it’s eye opening to a grey sky, with moving clouds, on a rock, wading in the velvet blackness of space quaked us, and I said “Oh. It’s one of these,” as I sat on the ground my feet beneath me, the tree above and before me, and them behind and beside me.

Presence. God. I needed to feel and see God in the present moment.

And I saw light.

And they saw light in a different way.

They reminded me that darkness is as light, and there are some things beyond my ability to calculate or know.

They reminded me that darkness is as light, and above it all, God is love.

They reminded me of the truth in paradox.

They asked if I was talking to the tree, and I said it wasn’t about the tree, and in those very words saw my inhalation as something coming from the tree, and my exhalation as something returning to it. I saw the tree as origin.

I apologized for my arrogance, for my mistranslation of what they said.

Their dad came.

And I saw love.

I saw a man who struggled, with empire and also the totality of existence.

I saw a man who loved his child.

I saw a human willingly sacrifice; time, energy, resources, mental space, for their child.

I saw love.

I exhaled. And wanted to play on the spinning wheel.

When I got there a child asked if they could play on it.

I said yes, and took a step back and watched what it was like to have the mind of a child.

I said yes, to giving someone else space.

I looked to the right, which was the farthest corner in the park away from the Armory, and I saw a putt put golf course that was a made by a collaboration of artists in Providence, and spearheaded by an individual who describes herself on Instagram as a person who “imagines new possibilities and collaboratively brings them to life.”

The putt put course is free, open several days a week and is volunteer operated.

It is a way to unite the community of Providence’s West End a community that has been facing the neo-colonial weapon of gentrification, of differences not being listened to, of diversity not being celebrated..

I had been asking a lot of hard questions that week, and God seemed to answer them with a free putt put course on the edge of a park, which sat like an encampment of a cavalry preparing to overtake an Armory.

Putt put is a perplexing thing.

It brings joy, it brings solidarity, and communion.

It brings presence.

Back at their house we talked about empire, and it’s ever-expansive ghost, that haunts our histories like a demon unable to leave the earth. We talked about empire and it’s narrative, which plagued humanity like a sin. We realized that there has always been Caesars, Emperors, Presidents, nations, which preached an ideology of commonwealth, but stood for the wealth of a few. Which stood for power and dominance, which prized mighty warriors and warfare, genocides, and the displacement of people with a different technology, over peaceful, collaborative, conscious, forward movement that brings joy and is based in something simple like putt put.

We talked about the house that was built in the 19th century, the punked out space where folks were looking for something and finding it in communion with flesh and blood. We talked about the house with it’s writings on walls and refrigerators and realized that it was something; a place that community could grow, like mushrooms, like trees, like a garden overtaking a city so that the city begins to looks like a commonwealth made of earth, a city on a hill, a capitol of heaven.

We talked and we realized that Moses and Elijah were rising up like Joshua rebranded to go speak with the faces of empire.

[roadstoprovidence]

You were first a fort sitting on a mountain destined to be conquered by the maker of your fortification, its bricks, its muds, its first pieces.

And we saw.

And we saw.

And we saw.

And you became settled, your dust unresponsive to wind, immovable, married to earth, you called her partner as you expanded like a newborns body living out it’s genetic code in a mirage of physicality.

And we heard.

And we heard.

And we heard.

And from you wisdom grew across earth like a vine, like something which first reminds us of the transmutation of faces in the story of  prebirth to after death. Something that at the commencing of the world to come proved itself to be complex, like technology exponentially affecting our thoughts, like love expanding and pain being universally felt.

And from you that were a castle on a mountain, immovable,

we ate.

From you who wisdom grew out of like invisible seed planted in the innermost part of our humanity

we drank.

From you that stretches out like a vine to unravel the way to the promise of peace, of well being, the new day, its’ throne, its’ citizens,  and its’ sovereign;

From you we drank and knew joy.

  And you grew and you grew and you grew

And from inside of you came

a sky and an earth that knew no war, no drones, no guns.

And there was joy.  Great joy.

[roadstoprovidence]

who wants to raid the homo nest now ?

The Stonewall Inn sits nestled between an investment realty property seeking nesters and a nail salon.

The residue of revolution fallen like a casualty in the endless war against capital, against mechanization for the Levitathan, against the hegemony of heterosexuality.

My first journey here was as tourist.

Photo Snapped.

Digitalized. Then uploaded to a Myspace account long forgotten. To show I was here.

   Diagonal to this place of queer pilgrimage lies a square, 

in it sits

                           other,

                                               in-between, 

                          woman,

man,

              them,

and none of the above. They are mostly older.

I walk inside of this square space.

Sit,

Then write this poem.                                                                    

I walk inside of this queer space and look at the plaster sculptures that have become the most tangible piece of evidence that queers were here.

Queers are here

on this continent and others unlike it

Queers are here.

Homeless and HIV positive,

we are here.

Hardened and intellectual,

we are here.

Toothless and desperate for a cigarette,

a warm bed, a meal,

we are here.

Privileged in wealth, and the ability to rehash,

whiteness, and dominance;

they are here too

searching like Dorothy Gale.

ALL

searching for community that was and arguably

ISN’T

as radical as faerie

as revolutionary as Nugent and Ginsberg

as reactive as the faggots and trannies

who acted up the night Judy Garland died.

Behind the four plaster sculptures is a sign.

It reads, "Gay Liberation".

An old black queer whose name is gift of God walks up to me. Tells me I am a gentleman,and that his mother died on his birthday some years ago, he has HIV and no where to rest his head. He asks for a meal. I do what I can.  

He walks away, and I wonder if we queers have been liberated or if we gave up the fight for the investment realty property seeking nesters.