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Image Gallery: "I'M A THUG, BUT I SWEAR FOR 3 DAYS I CRIED."

published on 26 October 2022

The artist Kendario La'Pierre created a series of images in response to Mettamodernist's poems from their book "I'M A THUG, BUT I SWEAR FOR 3 DAYS I CRIED."

The artist Kendario La'Pierre created a series of images in response to Mettamodernist's poems from their book "I'M A THUG, BUT I SWEAR FOR 3 DAYS I CRIED."

"SWEET PICKANINNY BABY JESUS."
Kendario La'Pierre

I read that Sartre once said existence preceded essence

Schopenhauer believed that a chair and man contained the same essence

This is the first sentence, mon premier cogito, the primary proposition,

I’m sitting by myself at a cafe in downtown Brooklyn,

whistling to the weeping guitar by the window, on a nude bone chair,

burdened by heat and bouts of entropy, with glass knuckles and teething self-growth.

I have chewed off what was left of my fingers just by an insipid desire to seize

something greater than obligation, greater than arbitrary, than patrimony

And the requiem of self, shouting at the moon in the naked hour.

I suffered many moons in the absence of sun, hoping everyday rectifies with oxygen.

We’ve all made this mistake, waiting by the bar for lucidity to stumble in
and offer herself as a night cap. But it never happens. 

So we learn to live with dreamless sleep, chained to cotton feet,

Like an aneurism in the sun, suborned by a god,

incubating futures like bones with breath.

I have spent the best and worst days of my youth

gathering all these pieces of me,

I’m still not quite sure how to see myself home.

What do we fear? That’s the question, the only real one left.

Is it our self-portraits of fragmentary displacement?

We fear our possibility of power beyond measure,

life without the theory of theology, and the self, we do not take the time to understand.

What we are left with is a life undefined, preservation without perseverance,

perseverance without purpose, or purposeless purpose.

This poem, almost impossible to decipher means this time, this time is time,

And time is always running, as in here & now, as in avoid the illusion.

Where Thou art — that — is Home —

"THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, THE FUTURE AN ALIEN PLANET."
Kendario La'Pierre

What has me lying here on a synthetic bear skin sofa,

In this room where healing is sacrosanct, where “I” like being fucked,

Amongst the hundreds of Buddhas the size of humans seated in fainting chairs?

I'm overwhelmed by the smell of sound and our quiescent eve,

Snorting type O positive laced ketamine, and starved for financial gain.

“I” have a vague hope this is the start, or at least the precipice of a reboot.

How can I put this? “I’m” tired of hiding behind metaphors.

“I’m” not my best self all the time, “I’m” selfish, “I’m” insecure,

“I do” shitty things and spit venom when I’m not in the mood.

“I’m” often trapped in the bubble of a projected image,

my fear of insignificance traps me in insignificance,

the crushing sense of failure leaves permanent trepidation

to the point where the only choice is not to move.

This summer was “my” first taste of recovery,

“I” have become more spectral than slovenly squalid,

“I” know the Holy Ghost now, “I” am omniscience without concurrence.

“I” have felt the hands of God on the verge of collapse,

“I” am omniscience without concurrence.

“I” am destined to infuse meaning with survival.

“I” have felt the hands of angels on the verge of collapse,

“I” have heard the resurrected three of four languages,

lost like distinction from another lake; that initial scene reveals metamorphosis,

among the hour of solitude & the archaic remnants of the pre-digital age,

improvised, everything fluctuating like life, through semantic incompatibility.

“I” still might change my name to disguise my sins,

A name behind all names, Christians will call me Christ,

“I’ll” reject the name and show them the stigmata’s daddy left me.

"HOW TO PERFORM A HEAD TRANSPLANT"
Kendario La'Pierre

My room bends, cracks in the foundation,

This daily commitment to life and living through it feels laborious,

The commandment that was passed down to Adam who re-framed unto Cain,

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored sociopath.

Not that I'm a sociopath, I wouldn't know, but I am bored.

Lost in the great nothing, like drowning without the water,

no pulse, no bounds. Unable to move, or think, breathe, life feels heavy,

and everyone is too busy pretending not to feel anything, or feeling everything at once.

I can smell what's left of my childhood through the walls, cigarettes, and mashed potatoes,

and comic books, and NASA. What if I don't accomplish anything and end up like my father?

That isn't a question anyone can answer, I'm only asking because I'm scared shitless.

I'm the center of several worlds being slit open sideways, I gasp at how time flies.

My niggas gasp at how time flies. My dog gasp at how time flies

I wish to scatter my imagination and release chaos into the sky.

I wish to grow larger than the mountains and the wind,

Than the trees and the oceans, larger than land, than the planets and constellations,

larger than the big yellow ball in the sky, still missing the other ball and its sack.

Larger than Gods of Greek thrillers, tragedies, and comedies

with a head of a horse, one eye, ibis horns, wings, and two faces.

Larger than a superhuman mirror resembling dream,

I have a twenty-first-century hangover,

Standing naked in a form unbearable to consume,

As I meander through the inclination of my mind's eye,

And the years wear on me -- like blood, oil, and sweat.

This daily commitment to life and living through it feels laborious,

To paraphrase Biggie, you either play ball, sell drugs, or entertain.

The American flag is made of combustible metal and lackadaisical aloofness.

The notion of Satyagraha is bullshit, but this isn't a poem about that.

This poem is Horace's concept of mimesis

Abandoned by intoxicated ism's and vanilla rhapsodies.

Tonight was black coffee & white wine

transcendentally nacreous with an open mouth

For a brief moment reality shrugged & infinite Awareness -

Existence - bliss flooded between

Continental plates of /ˌi(m)ˌmôrˈtalədē/ n' matter.

My mother once said, the best ideas were birthed out of a hungry stomach

pretend it's hip hop or something more; pretend it's Jesus or one of his pseudonyms;

Pretend it's not what you thought it would be; pretend anything, so long as you stay hungry.

by that I mean, the answer is not to wait for higher meaning, or for life to reveal itself

between grief and skin, and nailed loss, and the pornography of being and having,

Between what is woven to deceive memory,

And the symbols of speaking life in stillness.

By that I mean, the answer is

backward and inside out, disguised as duality

Whereas we become full of others, repeating ourselves,

beneath the weight of everything that belongs to other people, like a hierarchy of heirlooms.

When we've grown weary with holding the sun just before sunrise every morning,

and run dry of radical designations the only hope left is to rework by ax,

and uncover by shovel.

By that, I mean, the answer is in our ambivalence to fold.

We twist and bend and brawl at death

Feeling a little more than preludes for what will still be, until it is.

do not wait for life to reveal itself

do not wait for life to reveal itself

do not wait for life to reveal itself

Your future breaking away doesn't want it.

it is as you are, on another side

of what we tell ourselves

in moments of crisis.

"THIS IS AN AMERICAN FLAG ON FIRE, PISS ON IT."
Kendario La'Pierre

My room bends, cracks in the foundation,

This daily commitment to life and living through it feels laborious,

The commandment that was passed down to Adam who re-framed unto Cain,

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored sociopath.

Not that I'm a sociopath, I wouldn't know, but I am bored.

Lost in the great nothing, like drowning without the water,

no pulse, no bounds. Unable to move, or think, breathe, life feels heavy,

and everyone is too busy pretending not to feel anything, or feeling everything at once.

I can smell what's left of my childhood through the walls, cigarettes, and mashed potatoes,

and comic books, and NASA. What if I don't accomplish anything and end up like my father?

That isn't a question anyone can answer, I'm only asking because I'm scared shitless.

I'm the center of several worlds being slit open sideways, I gasp at how time flies.

My niggas gasp at how time flies. My dog gasp at how time flies

I wish to scatter my imagination and release chaos into the sky.

I wish to grow larger than the mountains and the wind,

Than the trees and the oceans, larger than land, than the planets and constellations,

larger than the big yellow ball in the sky, still missing the other ball and its sack.

Larger than Gods of Greek thrillers, tragedies, and comedies

with a head of a horse, one eye, ibis horns, wings, and two faces.

“TRUISMS RMX.”
Kendario La'Pierre

I saw the best and blackest minds of my generation,

Dragging their namesakes through drugged negro streets.

In conflagration and consummation, sacks on their backs,

Burned bloody from chance collision and ordered chaos, chewing on strangled sobs,

shrieks of condemnation, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, self-recrimination,

damnation, etc.… Each stopping against a dream held in a dandelion clockwork's orange,

witness to a world beyond ability to alter, where time is the dictionary inside our bibles,

And nostalgia rests with withered roses in the forehead.

I have seen the ghetto, the rough, the black, the hangman’s noose,

the exhaling of a world in meme format, the borders closed to refugees, no exit.

I am evicted in a time of forgetting, I cannot forget the 6 million Jews killed in Europe,

the 12 million Indians killed in the United States, the 40 million children living in poverty,

and doomed to technological deprivation. I distrust our human-ready packaged romanticism, too many paths lead to trauma,

you will find me with the diaspora, feigning dysphoria, vestal skin peeled, pits removed, lips cooked.

You will find me long haired and Demi-God-ish, grinning happily in my inertia and lethargy.

How fantabulous it must have been to live in a time when America was great,

When whites were just as fond of Russians as they were homosexuals and niggas,

You musta' been fond of gas masks and war stories at the dinner table in your nuclear bunkers,

In the fumes of our discontent, we chase fatality waiting for all these roles to reverse,

Who fights oblivion from vengeful oppression? Who needs history to absolve?

We have no-joy, no-laughter, no-tears, no-woe,

Wand' ring from earth to earth, from non-apathy, -empathy, -sympathy, -grief, -regret.

Great God! I do not feel Thy present Deity,

Everywhere feel Thee-Thou art aren't there.

I have seen us walked on, talked over, lectured on our own minds with a poets furor.

We really don't ask for much, just a sliver of that sweet American pie

you keep choking on, the one you say White Jesus gave you and only you.

We are Precarious. Precious. Ponderous. The children of the apocalypse writing itself into stone,

As tragedies fall upon empires gold, wherever we go we came from, whoever we are we will always be,

We are not who we think we are, we are the extent to which we struggle to evolve,

What we need is a sermon, parable, something with some kitsch,

We must reclaim the blood from the soil, we must tell the babies the blood

which flows in their veins today built Pyramids from stones centuries ago,

We must tell them the voice that whispers in the witching hour are our ancestors,

There's no ethereal land line to God or Allah. One cannot grit teeth at our daemons,

with cries of impudence, heresy, and miscegenation, and still, look sane nowadays.

Some will say there is no hope, our body of creation is an illogical dream

in a satin Gordian bow, but resilience is a meditation a monk carries like a knife

when peace is nowhere to be found. Cliche, but our universe can be measured in clichés.

I have seen us unable to turn off, devotees to desire in DIY homes of resistance.

We came into this world buried in plastic, starving, and in need of work,

Always knowing we were wiser than measured but too broke to actualize.

I saw this future, and I see the next one, we will eat the rich to death of material just as ubiquitous,

We will eat the rich to death of material, and fear, and anger.

And the New Babylon predicted in Baldwin's prose, twisting and shouting in impotent rage,

making and mending mental scars, lithified to the pills and advertising, to mob mentalities,

to high standards no one can reach, the tyranny of mindless likes, to political correctness, to instant satisfaction,

to the frugalities, the small privations, the mediocre applauding mediocrity, and conjecture,

the paucity, the ripest flesh from our lacquered, crackled bone,

we bleed out in "new and improved contradictions" to cope and fight,

This message will like rise like temptation, it will scold, ridicule, and knot itself in your mind, you will lay it down

and you will lie with it, but it won't leave you alone, it will emerge tongue and teeth,

after the American apocalypse, after the Phaethon unleashes the steeds of Armageddon,

and the hills burst into flames, and the people's blood boils through flesh,

after the mountains crumble, and the sea finally takes the face of equanimity,

And the door to everything opens its terrible mouth the resurrection of life will be a silent tongue,

like a bone without a dog, a sound no one hears, symbolizing nothing.

"FALSE SKULLS #003: MUMBLE RAPS.”
Kendario La'Pierre

The socio-politico-cultural movement described as Surrealism depicts the universal human quest in maladroit juxtapositions of loneliness, revulsion, madness, non-reality, angst, and euphoria within an ambiguous, incongruous, and albeit symbolically paradoxical framework. Surrealism is not merely fantastical or bizarre melting clocks without time, African villages turned on its side, or bowler hats, but a vanquishing of death, or at least the fear of it. It is the sanguine face we wear in response to life by incomprehension; resigned to an existence without Biblical meaning. The word first appeared in 1917, in the literature of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire who used it to describe his own work 'The Breasts of Tiresias'. He believed Surrealism and all of its discomfiting awareness meant the fruits of the human condition freed from the task of imitating the human condition. Surrealism was born out of the spirit of Dada, it emerged in Europe during the tenuous-turbulent years of WWI leading up to WWII. It crosses borders seamlessly between animate and inanimate, conscious and subconscious. However, Freud himself disparaged this ideology. He acknowledged that Surrealist artists were producing great works, but wholeheartedly believed that ego and conscious laid foliage along the passage. So the art continued, but the movement of the bizarre, the irrational, oftentimes hyper-attentive and hallucinatory lost its vigor and momentum. Later, in 1974 Amiri Baraka coined the radical-racial plurality of Afro-surrealism. D. Scot Miller penned the manifesto in 2009 with permission by Baraka, in it he asserted the Afrosurreal rejected the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans…" It is the Future-Past, present-day realism, and the everyday lived experience, it is Samuel R. Delany's 1974 Dhalgren, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Arthur Jafa and "the alien familiar," Kanye West Yeezus, Beyonce & Jay going Apeshit in the louvre, "Get Out" and "Atlanta", "Sorry to Bother You," Prince's Purple revolution, Bob Kaufman, Jean-Michel, Ralph Ellison's 1952 classic novel Invisible Man, African and African-Caribbean artists André Breton and Aimé Césaire, René Ménil's Antillanité movement, Kool Keith's Dr. Octagonecologyst! This is Afro-Surreal! Afro-Surreal postulates the internal black experience beyond the rational mind, striving to manifest with this visible world. Afro-Surrealists recognize the concept of "symbolic immortality," that we might be freed from the tyranny of the mundane, of logic, and that we might discover truths more real than reality. Afro-surrealism is the juxtapositions of untamed thought, cymbals of deeper experience between the primal Dionysian and the plastic intellectual Apollonian, the Dionysian speaks to the emotional mind, while the Apollonian speaks to the rational mind. Afro-Surrealists build distinctive worlds ruled by unfiltered, unapologetic blackness. This is Afro-Surreal! While Afrofuturism refers to free expression of black subjectivity, the unearthing and sometimes reconstruction of buried African history, a contemporary genre of Black diasporic writers, artisans, musicians, theorists, and philosophers that blend Afro-culture, sci fi, magical realism, technology, and traditional African myths & mysticisms. It is the language of rebellion taking many forms, both posthuman and technological, an intersectional lens through which we view futures or alternate realities, where worlds exist without European colonialism or pseudo-Western Enlightenment. Reimagining new forms of temporality at the intersection of time, memory, and love, while seeking to reclaim black identity. Afrofuturism is a reaction to European expression, and the global status quo, it wrestles with political, economic, social, and technological inequalities. The term derives from a 1994 essay "Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture" by Mark Dery, an author, critic, and essayist. Dery used the term to define "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture — and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future." That describes W.E.B DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Nnedi Okorafor, Edward Johnson, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Solange, Sun Ra, George Clinton and his band Parliament and again Prince.

"TIME OUT OF THE FOURTH SEX.”
Kendario La'Pierre

Anonymous One.

Be an eye among the blind.

Be empty before the fat feeds the fire.

Be a literalist of the imagination.

Be committed to something outside yourself.

Become a new mind and make it newer.

Clutter is the culprit of homicide.

Compose on the tongue, not on the page.

Cough up the Pollock-phlegm of phenomena.

Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking.

Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it.

Do not cater to the Middle Mind of the masses.

Do not destroy unless you have something better to replace.

Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Listen to your own breathing.

Never start anything you can’t finish.

Remember all doors are trap doors.

Remember, remembering is always futuristic.

Read between the lines of human discourse.

Reimagine, Reengineer America and the world.

Sweat out the repetition of nostalgia.

Speak from your chest, not through your nose.

Speak up. Break shit. Act out. Silence is com­plicity.

Stay naive, non-cynical, as if you just landed on earth.

The future does not care for the ambiguity of poetry.

There’s meaning in the bony silence, grey turnings of life.

Trust in the imagination and re-fertilize it.

Words can save where guns can't.

Who’s watching the watchers.

Your halfway point has no arrival.

You are not Yourself.

Artworks:
Kendario La'Pierre

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