Disco Demolition

For Jason Tseng, Micah Bucey, and Gloria Gaynor.

In the 1970s, disco,
the child of soul, funk, and salsa,
was the most popular music in America.
Every nightclub pulsed with that four to the floor beat
from New York to Los Angeles,

And it was gay and brown and beautiful,
not in spite of
but because of these things.

When the White Sox blew up a crate
of disco records at Comiskey Park,
they weren’t trying to destroy a few pieces of vinyl,
they were trying to comfort regressive troglodytes.

The backlash against disco
wasn’t just the usual exhaustion
with a dead genre,
but fear of a black planet,
of a gay revolution,
of a Latin uprising.

The National Pastime
has always been slamming
a boot down on the neck
of somebody different.
But our lives were never a game
and rhythm has always been
in a league of its own.

So when fascists arrive
armed with bluster and bravado,
erect cocks barely disguised,
show them how bone dry palms
wrung out by self-hatred can’t hold
this sweat slick skin.

When they try to apprehend your beauty
show them what all this cardio was good for
and make your fabulous escape.

Show them why
we measure records
in revolutions per minute,
and their only choices
are thirty three
or forty five
not zero.

When the idiot astronomers of
social conservatism
try to convince you that
the universe revolves around them,
tell them that retrograde motion
is nothing but the illusion of a false perspective.

Our Earth always spun around this exquisite sun,
unafraid to be sequin and glitter.
This world only spins forward,
and our dream of
beatmatched brothers and sisters
moving from song to song
seamless
is the Truth.

So when fascists call your heart a crime scene,

dance.

When they bring cinderblocks
to build your body into a prison,

dance.

When they try to bludgeon you with their God,
tell them love
has always been the moral majority

and fucking dance.

And when this is all over,
and we’ve won
smile
and ask them:

Did you think we would crumble?
Did you think we would lay down and die?

No.

We survived.

Why I Love Han Solo

When Han Solo says:
“Crazy thing is… it’s true. The Force. The Jedi… All of it… It’s all true.”
Rey, Finn, and every Star Wars fan hear
their childhoods confirmed,
as if the wrapping paper tube
was a lightsaber the whole time,
as if Jar Jar Binks never happened,
as if we were never naive
to put our faith in clean firewalls
between good and evil.

But in that joy
we miss how Han says it
with the weight of a man
who’s lost it all
to something
he didn’t even want
to believe in the first place.

In the smoke and acid jazz of that cantina,
Could Han have possibly known where
Ben Kenobi’s simple job
would lead?

That he would go from scoundrel
to hero
to husband
to father
and back again?

For Han, when the Force Awakens,
it steals his only child.

When Han says the Force is real,
he isn’t exalting a childhood fantasy,
he’s saying that for some people the universe
is something that just

fucking happens to you

like freight trains
or drunk drivers
or suicide

and after you dig yourself out of the wreckage
all you can do
is go back
to the only thing
you were ever good at,
which was theft,
which is to say taking something back
from a galaxy that took so much from you.

Some people love Han Solo from Episode 4 to Episode 6
but the Han I relate to
is old Han from Episode 7,
because he knows what it feels like
to lose something.

My Han asks
where the Force was
when Snoke twisted
every beautiful thing inside of his son
into nothing but blackened gnarled wood
and a lightsaber so full of darkness
that it spits and screams and can
barely hold its shape,
a monster that worships
the family’s black caped mistake.

And in the bottom of his cups,
he screams at the Force
to take it all back,

to save him from Mos Eisley
and all his goddamn heroic choices.

That maybe the Force could
let him know
that he ought to tell
Ben Kenobi to fuck off
and find another sucker
for the galaxy to act out
its grand stories upon?

That maybe Ben
should find
some other fool
to save the princess
and marry her.

Some other fool
to lose his princess
his ship
his son,
who’s also named Ben
because the Force
is not omnipotent
but it does appear
to have a sense of humor.

But deep down, Han knows
“That’s not how the Force works.”

That’s not how it works.

It just grinds forward
through friends
through love
through children.

And if the Skywalker Solo family curse
is fighting
the same war
over and over again
forever.

Then in the end,
all you have,
is the choice
to walk onto the bridge

and tell your son
one more time
that you love him

and he can come home

if he wants to.

For Those Considering Suicide

For Those Considering Suicide

After “All The Way Through” by Bane

Scientists call the seabed a wasteland
lifeless for a thousand miles,
but there is a miracle in its persistence,
how it endures under all that depth,
how it resists all that pressure.

If you decide to stop your walking,
but the rope snaps like your last nerve
or the belt buckle unpins itself
or your blood clots,
your hemoglobin rebels
against razor blade
like a corporal disobeying
his lieutenant’s order to kill
if your kidneys and liver tear
the poison out of your veins in gross defiance,

if your brain is nothing but a wailing chorus
of broken glass throats
and your only audience is a mute God,
trust in your flesh,
this machine designed so well for survival
that it completely regenerates every seven years.

Trust a heart wise enough to ignore your calls
not to beat, not to break.
Trust muscles that bruise when struck,
trust eyes that thirst for sunlight
and scowl against the wind.
Trust the rhythm of your breath;
it will not betray you.

I won’t lie to you.
The point is not that life is good
the point is that it’s worth
ten thousand kicks in the ribs
to snatch out one motherfucker’s eye
and force him
to remember your name.
This is the only hope I know.

I’m not stupid enough
to tell you to
feel thankful for the ghost
of your breath
in the pitiless moonlight.

But I am desperate enough to tell you that
I am thankful
for the beautiful ghost
still aching inside your frame.

I pray it stays there.

In a world where death always wins,
I’m begging you not to hand it
any more premature victories.

In a world that has committed
so many crimes against you,
commit one against the world
and survive.
Today, two wrongs keep you alive.

I know you can’t wait on a miracle.
But the truth is
miracles are just what happens
when your mind gives meaning
to unfathomable joy.

Joy is not the cessation of pain.
It’s just your breath
finding the blessing of air
as your arms and legs
thrash against a raging ocean.
It’s the laugh you manage
at your mother’s funeral.

Joy is every morning I wake up
with you still in this world.

This world is still for you.

Come unto me,
amidst all this witnessless sacrifice.
If you look up into the night sky
and all you see
is just the moon
and the stars
and all the metaphors are stillborn inside of you,
come unto me,
this motherless firstborn son
made of nothing
but frayed cotton and moth wings,
and throw your weight onto me,
collapse like a monument to
every deaf, dead god;
I will carry you on bent back
without a prayer, without a whisper.
When the banshees of your brain chemistry
refuse to cease their howling
come unto me
and I will show you
how I can scream louder,
how we can scream together
into all this pitiless darkness.

Abide with me.

And we will call this
a miracle.

Making it in NYC

My friends Tara Bracco and Jason Tseng interviewed Sarah Cameron Sunde, a prominent NYC director, and I found the video terrifically inspiring. Tara and Jason asked commentators to add their thoughts, and how they started working in the biz. Since I love pedagogy, I ended up writing a long bit about my life so far, and thought you soon-to-be or recent college graduates might want to read it. Enjoy!

I don’t know if I qualify as “working in the biz” but I’m involved with several theatre companies, including The New Street Poets, The Spoken Word Almanac Project, and Poetic People Power.

As the names of those groups attest, I am a spoken word theatre artist. I graduated Rutgers University in 2005 with a BA in Theatre Arts and English, moved to Jersey City and launched myself into the NY metro area art scene in 2006, couldn’t find a job, and promptly went broke. But through all that madness I never forgot my old college contacts. Through them, I continued to get booked to perform as a poet (for free of course – never look down on free gigs!) at Rutgers and the surrounding area.

I remember the exact day my luck started to turn around. An old Rutgers friend (who was still a student) organized a Hurricane Katrina benefit, and booked several student artists, including me. We performed on the same stage as Miguel Algarin and Amiri Baraka (feel any way you want about the man, he’s important), where several hundred people saw us. At the open mic afterwards, I met LeDerick Horne, a poet and national disability advocate and public speaker, who wanted to create a play about the gentrification of New Brunswick, NJ.

LeDerick and I met up, talked, and I realized that LeDerick was not a theatre artist and needed my help. Through our contacts at Rutgers, we grabbed two other poet / theatre artists, and collaboratively created a spoken word play that went up at the Tony Award-winning Crossroads Theatre. We’ve since gone on to take this play to the Aetna Theatre, Brown University, the Clemente Soto Velez Community Center, the Riverside Church Theatre, and the FringeNYC 2007 festival.

Since then, I’ve maintained my visibility in the spoken word community by going to every open mic I possibly could, jumping in on every possible project I could, and working my ass off. I have a day job, but it’s fairly easy going. It gives me a decent wage and health insurance. The knowledge that you can go to the hospital if you break a leg is an amazing peace of mind. You don’t realize how valuable it is til you lose it.

Remember those open mics? As time went on, people started to know who I was, and that I was serious about being a spoken word artist. When I went to the first  Spoken Word Almanac Project performance in 2008, I was absolutely blown away, and begged the founder, Darian Dachaun, to let me in. Due to his familiarity with my work, he let me in, and this brought me closer to great poets involved with the project who have become friends and contacts.

Another thing to do – keep learning new skills. I’ve always had a passion for music, but I’m a lousy guitar player and a mediocre singer on my good days. In college, I often put together play lists on the fly in iTunes and Winamp for parties. It was very primitive DJing, but I definitely fell in love. After college, I ended up buying my own DJ set up and PA system. By constantly reading about DJing and sound technology, I learned how to set gains on a mic to avoid feedback and get the best sound out of a mixing board by tweaking EQs. I also learned about signal chains and mixing different instruments. These skills are surprisingly rare, and nothing can really replace someone who knows them. Once I was confident enough to get out in the field and give it a shot, I started doing sound tech for whatever event was going on in my local scene. You’d be amazed how happy people will be to see you when they can’t figure out why their mics aren’t working. Again, this brings you closer to more people, improves your standing in the community, and let’s face it – I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was fun.

Also, don’t underestimate your local scene and community. I live in Jersey City, NJ just a short PATH train ride into Manhattan. The burgeoning art scene here has shorter lines to the top, a closer community than Manhattan, and a generally friendlier and more open vibe. Through this scene, I’ve started hosting my own open mic (to give back to the community), gotten involved with the local theatre companies, and started working on a performance series that blends modern dance, music, poetry, and live visual art.

So if I were to boil this long comment down to a few tips, here they are:

1. Remember your old college friends.
2. Be willing to work for free a LOT. You’re doing this for the love anyway, aren’t you?
3. NYC is not the be all and end all. Get involved in your local scene.
4. Open mics can help you increase your visibility and improve your reputation.
5. Never stop learning new skills. Make yourself indispensable, and people will never stop calling you.