i am exploring how the fulcrum of the African American Blues experience balances the sweat and blood of a black man on a pin and needle seesaw called turn of the century/ i am interested in exploring how to turn word/sentence/paragraph into carousels of giggle guffaw and gumption / i am interested in the political ramifications of neatly avoiding the placement of my foot in my mouth while firmly placing it up the ass of an uptight arts administrator/ i am currently exploring the medium of hoodoo and juju to land my fist in the back of ronald reagan's psychotic alzheimered brain, and make him see the bullet blasted face of each martyred sandinista by the light of every fired up crack pipe in america/ i am interested in the philosophy of payback, reparations promise ground to dust that caused my grand aunt to curse her mother's rapist's name/ i am interested in deconstructing the philosophy of every two bit gangsta that ever held a gun called greed to the head of tenement dwellers in the westside southside northside slum, where the little girl with beaded hair and greasy chocolate chip grin inherits roach droppings and lead painted breath cause city inspector is on landlord's bankroll/ i am interested in how 200 channels of vibrant air can get so dead in the vacuumed space of a tv tube / i find that directions can be dangerous if taken too often/ i have been handcuffed by directions from police officers who don't like petitions against police brutality, and so i have been forced to explore directions like ASSUME THE POSITION or HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK while being escorted from the scene of my melanized crime/ i want to perform the autopsy of america. i want to log the identifying marks of a place poplar/mountain/seagrass/sand/desert gorgeous when you cross country trip across its naked skin - i want to deduce the death date of its stillborn humanity smothered by avalanche of dollar bills slave chains smallpox blankets and strip malls/ when i was younger, my goals were weightless and floating, like being the first black astronaut, one that would never get "Lost in Space" like those pathetic fools on the Jupiter 2, but somewhere along the way gravity hitched tonnage to my dreams, made them as simple and galactic as writing one good line today, bending my head toward the paper and finding myself that much more whole with every word/ early in life i was afflicted with the goal of a wife, two and a half kids, a house and a station wagon, and that goal disappeared into a broke down 10 year old subaru and a flurry of part time gigs/ i now nurture the goal of a house a shotgun a car and myself with a lifetime woman, the solace of her hair across my face at sundown/ i have goals like everyone else but these words will never amount to anything that approaches the technicolor with which i saw them when i was ten years old, the way they were as easy to construct as the snaptite models of tanks, race cars and fighter planes i strung from the ceiling/ i am interested in the medium of all the highs and lows reached in my existence, and i want to wrench each one out and spill it on a page, noun for noun, verb for verb, shadow for shadow and funk for funk/ nothing i tell you here will amount to the medium of flesh and blood that spills from my mouth when i recite a poem i learned from my grandfather's pen, or when i tell you the way my grandmother used to laugh.

- Tyehimba Jess