dir/old_school/rant: P i s s e d   O f f 

Let me tell you something about wholesale anger.  It comes cheap, anyone can buy it, I don’t think the postal service was ever so full of anger, but our phone lines and email are nothing but bit’s and bytes of bargain basement seething emotions that we can generously apply in obese overtones.

People take to the online world with no sense of judgement, the internet is the place
Where everyone we thought so mature is suddenly in the position of ranting like a fucking child and that’s just what we do, cry and scream.  I’m sick of it.  Use a sense Of judgement, online, or off.  The only person who I can talk about who maybe has the balls to not be hurt, who it probably won’t affect is Paul, who has written me so many nasty, asinine, ill-responded emails that I think I could have him committed or at least refrained with a restraining order.

So other then the fact that he is a bit of a revisionist bastard –he still insists that the reason why he hit me with a chair when we were kids is cause I hit him first, which is bullshit! Paul was pissed, cause we played a rough game of hands on basketball. And I beat his ass, it didn’t help then that I completely derided his considerable machismo, when later in a tiff we argued and I boldly told him that I’d take him on in a fight and whup his ass with a hand tied behind my back.
 While I didn’t beat his ass as he beat me with a school chair, I did calmly reason with Paul that he should stop hitting me.  This was primarily out of numbed confusion and the fact that I was also afraid that I’d get hurt, angry and would kill Paul.

But Paul sends me nasty emails, it seems like, the closer we become..  The more I upset him because I do not have his get go and he let’s his anger or maybe just his disgust of me get The best of him and he’s frankly a mean kinda guy, generally succeeds in hurting my feelings like only a decade old friend might.  It also doesn’t help my paranoia or make me feel confident that one day, rather then hit me with a chair or say a nasty email, he might actually hurt me in some way. It’s odd that he doesn’t know that that is my fear, not an asswhupping but some horrible betrayal, where I’ll be left not only holding the bag, but maybe an armful of my guts as they hit the floor.  As Paul anger succumbs to the rules of life and spills over into the textual world.

Of course I’m babbling. And at the oh so risky expense of expressing myself online, but surely, other then to deride him as crazy I have not evened or balanced the deficit highway in which Paul has hurt me online and this isn’t meant to hurt, it’s just where I’m going right now.

We succumb to our anger or emotional spontaneity, with a sense of righteousness.  It is like it is a constitutional decree, or something.  What we usually end up doing though is hurting those we care for.  I think this paragraph is one which might get lost in the good of my bones and for many of you reading this, you’ll read to personally into it.

So here’s my point, I do not express or rage or get bent out of shape when I’m pissed off. A negative aspect to that refrain is that I harbor ill will towards people without sometimes giving them the right to make amends or even just know.  But I refrain, because I am sensitive to the fact that my anger can hurt you.  I used to think it was because I was a big black guy, who always came off as the cool guy and people were greatly intimidated by it.  But I’ve learned something.  I don’t like when you come to me with your sudden, un-thought out emotions and fling them upon me.  I don’t want to do that to you, scream, bellow, throw myself in vivid angst at you.  It’s a bit hurtful sometimes, maybe someone has done it to you too much or not enough for it to hurt, but it’s a bit painful to me, when you do it.

If you’re taking me to serious then fuck you.  I’m pissed and I want to actually try to cowboy my way around corralling this feeling.  Everyone says I don’t say enough, but doesn’t want to listen when I speak.  You might feel like this.  Hell, years ago, you might have read a bit of Henry Rollins yourself and somewhere you keep a diary full of shit like this? I don’t know, I did and I worshipped, him, a man who was strong of will, that not just through the delicacy and sophistication of prose or poetry, shared his words but through that raw typeface, that jumps from the cheap paper.  He stunned me, because he said “Lookie here homeboy! You can be pissed and still produce! You can be angry and still manufacture” I didn’t have to be depressed.  I didn’t have to be happy, I didn’t have to smoke camels in a Denny’s-with bad service, filling in my blue backed notebook, developing my style and distinction.  It wasn’t angst, it was fuck you and that’s what this is.  Fuck you!

You caress
Me while
We screw
And I catch
The scent of
Your ways
And I don’t
Quite know
If it’s the fuck
Or the caress
That is you.

I’m insecure
And you’ll
Have to pardon
Me as I have
Bought
The pedastel
And slaved over
The pedastel
Only to have you
Crush it beneath
Your weight
And in such a weak
Moment
I am confused by your
Caress

You are the first
In the light of
My darkness
Who cut so cleanly
Through my shield
And while we lay
And I bond
Oh so near
I feel your heart
In another place

So I wonder
In this dawning
Wakeful
Beneath your
Arms and legs
And think
With my cock and
My soul
If you’re my angel
Or my killer
Come to take
Me away?

And it’s like that, in the end, motherfuckers always walk away from your fruit loops trying to decipher your shit with a ring they got from Captain Crunch.  I don’t expect or want you to rip my words apart, I want you to question them, I want you to listen to my
Own words and before you’re pissed I want you to ask me what I meant, not flame me with your emote shun, but to grace me with your consideration and realization that the words you read might be different then the words you feel.

In the end, when I began Kung Fu it was a spin off a solo series, the poetry of Paul, well not really.  I never wanted to show my work, I didn’t want it to be my work, I wanted it to be me.  The poetry isn’t as polished and my rant isn’t completed edited to snuff and though cleaned up. It is a rambling mess I’m sure, but it is my groove and I’m feeling it. This is a little piece of who I am.  That what this online thing is isn’t it?

read the next piece: I write because one day I want to write something that really takes the blackness from me and lays it down on cool white paper and locks it in