"To Translate Theory into Practice, or, To Speak Emotion into Action" is a piece that I wrote on the verge of an emotional breakdown, when the reoccurring pain in my neck acted up, I took a week off work, ate mushrooms, flailed on life, and processed my feelings about capitalism.
lyrics
Im sick of cops.
Im sick of landlords
Im sick of bosses
Im sick of bullshit.
Im sick of thieves
Who steal
With legal documents
With borders, prisons, schools, and shitty food service jobs
Who commodity our empPOWERment
Into property-ownership and power-over
Which is to say, Im sick of this.
Im sick of profiteers who call the liquor commission
Im sick of hot-shot developers
Who will
buy up the neighbor
Who will
Evict my friends
Gut what I love
And hang it out to dry in this second-wave gentrification
(of which I am also guilty)
Or
Im sick of Emera and its stupid fucking oval
As though your hydro-electric facility, natural gas pipelines, and gas-fired power plant
Could actually name the grass
As though that the only thing that “common” is capitalism
Im sick of bosses who exploit us
Im sick of bosses who profit by selling the idea that they are not actually bosses.
(but co-ops imply co-operation, right?)
Well, I will not co-operate.
And I maybe complicit, but I will not be complacent.
Because I have been feeling a fire growing.
A small flame, that’s stoked, and spreads.
And burns.
And illuminates.
There is a rage in my core
That sits deep.
Solidifies.
Hardening my resolve.
To fight.
To struggle.
To build to unbuild.
Because I want to undo.
Layer by layer,
Piece by piece,
I want to lay to waste the ashes of this civilization
Trade my privilege in for liberation
Turn pain into art.
And destruction into creation.
That most beautiful alchemy
(of insurrection)
So yes, I want to throw bricks
By which I mean I want to lay bricks.
And build a foundation on which we can stand.
Not made of concrete but earth and cum and tears.
Where we can sleep in the exhausted oozing after-fuck of our
desires
So I am looking for change.
The subversive fringes underneath the packed centuries of filth
The hope that seeps through the cracks, pushes through the cement in the pavement
Like plantain
Which heals
And betrays hints
Like a whisper
That maybe
Just maybe
Something else is possible.
So I want to release what they have suppressed.
Honor pain, honor anger, honor survival
And honor the collective wisdom of those who came before us
And everything we still have yet to learn.
I want to reclaim my body, my heart, my communities.
I want to learn how to grow food.
I want to learn how to build houses.
To feed us. To shelter us.
To nourish strength in our vulnerability
To find spirituality in our connectivity.
So that we can learn how to hold each other
In ways that are actually fucking real
I want to unlearn the ways capitalism has taught me to think of emotional relationships in terms of hierarchy, competition, and scarcity.
So I want to learn how to trust you.
So that I can learn how to love you.
I want to learn how to stop using my white, male, able-bodied, middle-class, status-holding privilege
As a weapon
I want to challenge my desire for ownership,
For selfish entitlement
To prioritize my individual wants
Over our collective needs
Fuck that, I want to share.
Because I want to believe that
If I renounce all the empty promises
Of capitalism, exploitation, and oppression
Something MORE will come back to us
Something more important
Something more powerful
Something yet inarticulate
That I can
Just
Feel
Because I want to have faith in something bigger than myself.
Because our strength in always collective.
Because our liberation lives in all of us.
This album by Kenyan electronic producer rPH and poet Kins of Spade reflects on the impact of religion in their lives and society. Bandcamp New & Notable May 12, 2023
Poet Douglas Kearney and composer/producer/drummer Val Jeanty link up for a a compelling LP that feels like the written word come to life. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 30, 2021
On her new EP, Japanese producer Mikado Koko deconstructs the traditional, mixing avant-garde vocals and glitch breaks with koto. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 15, 2020
In a lane all his own, aint about me lays moody spoken word over rippling soundscapes on songs that feel cinematic in scope. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 23, 2020