A fun flash fiction I wrote a couple years ago based on a prompt from a local writing group contest. The large crowd hummed louder. Several A-level soldiers projected holograms from their chest sensors. One message read, “We Demand Immediate Maintenance!” Another, with flashing letters, said, “Your Heart Is Cold, Ours Are Not!” Yet another […]
Read More A Standard Call For ServicingI spent most of 2006 trying to get back to one moment. That moment came in April of that year when I was up all night reading Be Here Now by Ram Dass and smoking copious amounts of marijuana, completely engrossed by the content of the book and feeling myself rise out of my small […]
Read More Sankofa, the Fetching of Original Consciousness, and the Wisdom of AddictionThis is a flash fiction piece for which I won first place in the Writer’s Mill July online monthly contest with the prompt, “I thought my generation was very lucky until…” I had a lot of fun with it, deciding to come at it with a sympathetic view toward the Baby Boomer generation on which […]
Read More Undivided (flash fiction)She came to me as a diseased memory, softly held at the edges of spacetime. She was everywhere, yet nowhere, something unseen in the brilliance of the Grand Central Sun. Here I stand, shaken, shaking off the ashes of my yesterday death. We were always meant to meet Now, at this great pinpoint, a short […]
Read More A Memory CuredWe’re often taught about how we spend a third of our lives asleep, and how that’s a negative. In this capitalist culture built on the forced labor of people of color, it’s no surprise the brainwashing is so deep Black artists like rapper Nas decried sleep as “the cousin of death.” He meant this metaphorically, […]
Read More Sleep Is The Cousin Of LifeA road where two cannot pass; a table with three names; a parable unspoken; a field with no games. They chance upon grass of blood, soft and unwise, a monster laughs at their skulls: “Drown in the flood.” Sleepless nights give way to dreamless sleep. Chaos becomes them, utter simplicity takes a beat. A thunder […]
Read More Surrendered SkyThe moment perfected; A symphony, embracing the edges. Strands of sand Curdled together crawl through the maze of my mind. They beckon to be held, to be seen, refusing to wither. So I supplicate, and suffocate, darkness take me into the light A death perfected: a melody embracing the Mystery.
Read More Yesterday’s NoiseI am an “easy-to-digest” Black man. Like bran flakes, I’m less often spit out by white people. I talk “white,” being the son of a white mother who grew up in an overwhelmingly white suburb of Denver. I’ve even had at least two white people tell me straight to my face, I’m “one of the […]
Read More Palpatable BlacknessA fire ripped from my chest; A waterfall storms from my guts; A chain cuts on my wrist; A scream sinks into the rust. “Never shall you find me,” the breeze whispers. “I am your ending triumphant” “I am the grinding unpaid fee,” the brush fire bellows. “I am your candidate incumbent.” I crawl toward […]
Read More Million NightBrought to broken lands to break and infuse, and confuse. White man burdened to direct the economy. Black bodies, White tools Spoil the land with the blood of resistance. Where there are cries and sighs, The comfortable ignore, and delight: This is how it is, How it’s supposed to be So niggers, Sing those hymns […]
Read More Black Bodies, On Purpose
Clay The Scribe 