Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Telegenically Dead



“They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. […] They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”
--Benjamin Netanyahu

…the pain of the motherfuckin' not knowin' when the shit is gonna stop
--Sean Combs


Living on the Deathstar is a drag
Like it were always cuffin season
Not sacrificeable nor yet the future
What remains to be seen and what remains

Who shot ya? It's just like ashing,
So ashy it’s like the ash of this song
What thinking does a universalism
Becomes singular, all tragic with its hands

Up, suffering this long exhale, living on
In which phrasing won’t it be enough
To keep living the way we have
Telegenically dead but still dead

Or like ash undead, and song-like ash,
Like thinking does, come shadow come
Until we are in it, the street suddenly open
Put your middle fingers up, suffer this,

Everybody put your hands on your head
Until we are no longer the living dead
Or encrypted by the hegemon
Enemies are all we ever were

And curfews and ban
Don’t bring anyone back
Lose the feeling then gain it all
Back like power itself was dying

Like this were its song turned to ash
It would go something like this:

The rhetoric of respectability
And what pictures they would use
You’re nobody til somebody
The selfies with the boy playing dead

Kills you, fucks you up, when the cop
Is not a cop, is in fact a soldier,
A fascist, when revolution is not a luxury
“the luxury of my disbelief”  

The students demonstrate the
Presupposition of their interpellation
That "You're always already in the picture, 
it's always you, already"

And LeVar Burton offers advice about how to act 
While a wounded preacher shows us
Her wounds, the wounds of Mike Brown
And Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin

Thomas the Train rolls by, fucking with
The open, the truce among the
Gangs and who is really looting Ferguson
Ferguson, Israel; Gaza, USA

Homologies of power and Puff’s reenactment
Twenty years later, uncanny like the third
World has always been (with) us, always
Coconstitutive, reflected like those triangles

In Rick Ross’s aviators, tragedy and then
Farce, symbolic death and then the real death,
The real and its simulation, how we never
Were post-modern, the new old slavery:

“Where the thugs at?”
“Where the street tribes when we need y’all?”
“Who was present at the burned down QuikTrip”

“When you’re suddenly in the middle
of an inhuman situation that’s repeated
itself over and over and over for 400
years, you have to act fast.”

looking the part doesn’t help you brother […]
You create your own fictions.
To survive, to live. I understand.”

"Repeating Jesus, Jesus, Jesus"

"Young man gives cops the finger
immediately laser targeted with
an AR-15 in ‪#‎Ferguson"

“The police, black and brown bodies, war.
Can they ever be thought apart from one another?”

Why #IfTheyGunnedMeDown? #iftheygunnedmedownedburnitalldown
What picture would they use? WhiletheFedsWatch

"you are not the guy and still you fit the description
because there is only one guy who is always the guy
fitting the description."

"the male black,

he actually

fleeing,"


Turn the other cheek
now means
here are our collective asses to kiss.”

“y'all taking ice baths, like memes are charity.”

“Suddenly I found no new words.”


--With language from Wendy Trevino, Claudia Rankine, Simon Leung, Killer Mike, Le1F, Roxane Gay, Biggie Smalls, and many more.











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