building a nu amerykah

∞

As my homestate rounds the homeplate in the campaign to put the “messenger of hope” on the november ballot, i ask for all buckeye voters to cast their ballots with spirit-filled intention. It is the intention of the class of 2012 to build a nu amerykah. We ohioans want to make the river valley a safe and sacred space for the youth. Mothers and fathers in badu’s homestate of texas surely want the very same thing for their little cowboys and girls.

We are doing this whole voting thing to show a little bit of solidarity, but don’t get it twisted we also do a little bit of praying.

sweet sticky

Lying on my back, with mackin’ on my lap, staring at the crackin’ in the ceiling. Waiting for the word to come down. It could be days before the drought is over. I wish i could go sit and smoke a blizz with you in the meantime. In between transmissions from the Lord i think you could help me clear my mind. You would go so good with a puff and a pass. I’m finna forfeit my lent vows to get you hotboxed, and perhaps relapse after 60 days sober.

I’d love to try to change your mind. but the herb don’t change the mind no way. It can only more or less fuel the illusion that the tension is broken between us. Let this plant ease you from feeling you gotta ward off my manhood; and let it stop me from fearin’ your power to choose. You can read my palms, and sense that my touch carries both his mess and her caress. My air forces repressed muscle memory into your hips and you are torn between a shudder and a sigh of relief. The both of us, caught between a fear and a fetish; an attraction and an addiction, cannot deny it any longer. I wanna smoke with you, you wanna smoke with me.

“if i could slow you down sometime, i’d love to try to change your mind.”

change for a dollar (continued)

Dollar bills burn much faster than I thought they would. I guess I overestimated the fight that they would put up to sustain their existence. Watching the flame consume it gave me an amazing high. It was the satisfaction of completing a chapter of my life. There are many beginnings and endings that punctuate our growth. The various transitions are always marked by some memory that most represented it. As I watched the rest of the bill incinerating in the wooden bowl I knew that I would never forget burning my first dollar.

I had some kind of subconscious assumption that burning dollars is illegal. For some reason I have recollection of hearing this fact at some point. After the dollar bill had been reduced to a bowl full of dust on my bedroom floor, I checked on the internet for any U.S. laws that criminalized my actions. In fact, there is absolutely no law prohibiting destroying your own money as long as you don’t try to spend it again. I guess creating a law in itself would suggest that burning one’s own money is behavior that is conceivable. In a world where money is God and God is misoverstood the desire to chase paper is a given. I guess a fear of a lifetime in monetary hell (poverty) keeps us from defying the norm more than any law could do.

One of the most important items on the dollar bill are the words “In God we trust.” If money is your God, then trust is certainly the bottom line. The dollar can only have power if we trust and believe in it. I sat on my bedroom floor stirring the residue of the disintegrated bill with my fingers. I tried to visualize a world where a few of us could fully escape this reliance on materialism. How will we live outside of the system when it has invaded every cubic centimeter of the air that we breathe? This unknown places a layer of fear on the surface of my heart. If the greedy are in heaven and the needy are in hell then what will happen to the nonbelievers?