(Merlin's Magic, 2012)
God only made one of me.
Some brilliant flash in the sky. Some thunderous roar that you never heard outside of a Transformers' movie hits your face and squeezes into your ears. YOUR HEART IS RACING. You need to go to the bathroom but you can't get up. You are glued to your seat. You can see from where you are standing that the sky is turning all sorts of crazy colors. You're thinking, "Holy Shit". Exactly. Holy Shit indeed.
When the planets aline and Also Sprach Zarathustra is playing and those drums are a'beating, your chair becomes the front row the grandest of shit shows, what will you have then, in that exact moment? In a non-preacher-like way, what then, what about all of this (holds life, memory, history, and every experience you have gone through in my hands and hovers it before you). When all can be erased in a crazy flash in the sky and thunderous roars of instantaneous death, what then. I guess nothing really, everything that you knew is gone. But it is the fact that we are still here, that we survived it that we are able to really get our brains and hearts going, thinking, feeling, what we have right now. And what do we have?
The kid who raps to himself.
I'm living in a haunted house. I am living in a haunted house. I have lived in a haunted house, and I am still living in a haunted house. Wow. This is frightening and fascinating all at the same time. I race around my room, I am fourteen in this vision and I am wearing plain white socks for the first time in my life. I'm going to a party tonight, my last one in this town. My father and I had spent the past three days packing the house and I can go out tonight (not that I wasn't allowed, my folks were very easy-going and trustworthy). My sister's friend picks me up, her car is a coup so someone has to get out and pull their seat back and I enter, clearing a way for my feet in all the fast food packaging and bottles on the floor. I sink into the seat and we take off into what I would now call, "The Hood".
For some reason there are huge blanks in my memory, and I can remember the feeling, which was good, I could remember drinking and seeing my older friends. Everyone is doing unique handshakes, from this crew to this gang, and they're teaching me them. I'm wearing my big orange vest I called, My DJ Vest. I have a small notebook in my back pocket full of poems and tags. I have spiked hair and buzzed sides, I was somewhere between nu-metal and hip-hop, and I skateboarded. I got along with the people at the party. I drank their 40oz, and we talked poetry, about making your initials mean something.
They got to mean something. Take your time, you won't get it the first time but when you find it you'll remember it your whole life, it's your name after all.
BGK = Beginning Great Kills. Twelve years later what does that mean? I'm an artist these days, I've done alright, and I've done a lot and I'm always working. I manage to slip under the radar for sometime and now it seems like people are catching my name. It is BGK. What does that meaning still hold? It's strange I still remember that man's words, and my own "definition". I know beginning great doesn't work for me, that I have to work up to it or else if I get it then I feel lost, like I cheated, and that I don't deserve it. And that applies to just about everything. Nothing easy. Damn, I wish I had a "S" in my initials. Struggle, struggle is everything. I should've been named, Snake, and just Snake so that my initials are just, S. They'd call me the Struggling Snake, they'll laugh, I'll get back up and try again, keep on working at it, dancing dancing dancing until I get it. I am on fire with passion. No water can put me out. I am the oil to the watery world. And I am struggling to hold on, to you, to this world, and everything in-between. But when I have you, when I have this world, I will feel like I earned it. You can bet your ass I will. (And it will be good).
I hear a few of them freestyling. They're battling. There's a lot of, "Ooooooo" coming from the crowd circling around them. They're saying some funny ass shit. "Your motha....DES NUTS....When you're dead...bury you....just another....I'll build you up only to crush you down." They were at it for an hour and afterwards they shook hands and laughed. All that aggression out, they were best friends and they just rapped about personal and real things mixed with fictitious things about their relationship to each other, what gets to them, what bothers them about the other. It was spoken with volume and wasn't threatening but poetry. My sister's friend found me and put me in the car. We were leaving. Goodbyes, unique handshakes, and I'll-Probably-Never-See-You-Agains thrown around. In the ride back I remember looking out from the window and seeing Gallup, NM illuminated at night. A sea of amber lights floating over the hills and street lights coming closer and moving pass me until disappearing and being replaced by an approaching street light. I remember the fury of words that came flowing out, in my first freestyle in my head. I was alone and surrounded by drunk kids. I was leaving this place for good. And I knew I was going to really miss it.
Tell me more ghost stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment