An Assemblage
A New Patchwork Meditation Methodology
The house was slanted. Not solely because of the slope it was on but because the foundation was faulty. People tend to like only one thing to blame. Thus, the foundation collapsing became the background in the present threads making the tapestry of memory. The slope took up the entire foreground. When you walked from the front door to the back you felt the floor dip into the soft earth below. Furthermore, when you left you could finally breathe clearer. What was the reason for better lung capacity? The foreground memory became lint covered mattresses & walls. The background in the tapestry of memory was actually black mold. So the house sunk further into itself as time rapidly raced away. The one good thing was the neighborhood stray cats. I tried to feed them once & accidentally started a cat fight—a real one with claws, ripped fur, & hissing that registered as screeching car break lights. The cats ate well. I know they were full because they were massively rotund. However, clean water was rare to come by so every morning I watered them. Meaning I filled their bowl with fresh filtered water. In the summertime I did this twice a day & in the winter once. When I walked outside to pour new water for them the previous pour had frozen. A ice disc trapped with dead fallen leaves slid out in the gentle warmth of the sun rising. I know what it feels like to be presumed dead & trapped. I know the feeling of knowing that when you fall to rest something, an architectural fault & microbial force, is out to suffocate you. Or at least slowly drain you of all your life force while placing the blame on the foreground.
There are some pieces of art that move me so deeply that I wish I could experience them again for the first time. I think about the film stills, the textured language of a novel laced with poetics, & the time I first heard a song that simultaneously grounded & freed me. This feeling, a pull to re-engage with fresh eyes, is not as rare as I thought it was. There are still people moving through the world with a Poet’s heart making time feel wondrously inhabitable. I believe it is because these poets took their time to dare to be alive in a world committed to snuffing out life. The other day I was drifting off to sleep on the couch & my heart kicked my chest like a snare at a thought I had. The thought popped up the same way dandelions appear in the most random & desolate places. The couch I lounged on faces the front door. What if someone breaks through, like a dandelion, & turns a nap into a forever rest? I was thinking of Aiyana Jones & Breonna Taylor & Fred Hampton. Why is it that the dreaming state, the most liberating state of all, is also one where so many of us fail to rise from? When someone blows off the heads of dandelions where do those seeds land & what wishes do they learn to sprout? I wish I could watch Black Cake again for the first time.
I blocked an “expert” mentor’s email from reaching me. I received an email with the subject “AI Search Results”.’ After struggling for months to find an answer to my question I reached out for expert clarity. I reached out to pick the mind of another human being who may perhaps know more than me. Perhaps struggle isn’t the right word to convey process. I was exploring for months to find an answer to my question. I am not interested in evading exploration for the colonial glory of discovery. Something or someone has been here before & their impact is felt. I reached out to talk to a fellow wanderer. Yet, it seems that the world is shifting wanderers into explorers to expedite the conquest of land, capital, & possession of power. Then again, at the beauty store I asked an assumed wanderer a question who turned to another wanderer to ask chat gpt. Who gets to truly wander, fall, & know they can rise again? It’s getting warm now & it makes me think of Dajerria Becton. Dajerria was 15, in 2015, when a police officer twisted her arm, shoved her into the grass, pulled her by her braids, 7 at one point even sat on her outside of a pool in McKinney, Texas. I suppose Dajerra was able to rise after being pushed down. I think about her every summer & wonder where she is now.
Things That Rise:
water evaporating flooding air with humidity
fermented yeast festering in batters & dough
my chest & stomach at the start & end of it all (breathing through it all)
to my eyes, the sun every morning breaking the day
stalks & barks breaking through enveloped dark ground of safety
octaves of a scale
a people who are tired of having leather boots on their necks
temperaments when tested
conductors of freedom in fugitive networks & concert halls
monitors of the heart
people standing in ovation—a physical display of reverence—prayer
skin when it swells & blisters 
“And you wonder why I dream so freely/it’s because I’m never, ever really all that satisfied”— Lyric’s from Annahstasia’s song entitled “Satisfy Me” 44:31-44:40.
“Your dissatisfaction is actually power. You are dreaming and that’s an opportunity to for expansion and for imagining something new” — Annahstasia 44:52-45:06.
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
—Saidiya Hartman
I’ve been in a blue mood of adornment recently. Part of the beauty of assemblage is the “will to adorn” that Saidiya talks about. It’s being given scraps & saying you were whole all along through the constant stitching of a life. I’m also thinking of how true Jimmy Baldwin was, in “They Can’t Turn Back,” when he said “it took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself , and half believed, before I was able to walk on this earth as though I had a right to be here.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about the insidious nature of whiteness to make people of color hate every beautiful thing about ourselves. Only, for us to grow up & see others profiting off of the things we tried to pivot away from. Suddenly, having earrings hug your bass clef ears produces a staff for harmony to be curated & balanced through a “curated ear stack.” Suddenly, it’s rare to see a bonnet without a white woman modeling it after years of being teased for wearing it. Suddenly, the food that used to wrinkle noses at school lunch tables is savored for immaculate otherworldly flavors.
If Blackness continuously births cool then it is constantly being pierced to stain & saturate treble notes with zero soul. In accepting & choosing to return to my will to adorn I am taking back my bass. This bass reverberates in every choice I make from the moment I rise—especially in my voice. What a honor it is to create clearings to change the poetics that pull me through my life like ocean tides. I, like so many of us, am constantly attempting not to fall into despair. Though I’ve written similar statements to my previous one many times it never struck the exact chord running through my body. I’ve never lost all sense of hope. I have far too many things that remind me that we can start again: winter to spring, movements of the past, & more. I have however felt deep dissatisfaction with the ways I am expected to perform in the world to simply survive. Why has always been one of my favorite questions. It’s also the question that got me in the most trouble as a child. Why are things this way? The language I use surrounding the term despair is rooted in mapping how to avoid it. For me, there is no novelty in avoiding being dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction is simply the way I am feeling which points me to a desire to experience a different state. Because I love this world so much I want to dream up a new blue tune to run towards. Yes, I am unsatisfied. As long as that is the case then there is always something to be imagined until I am finally satisfied with the way things are.
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