Black Convocation/Ramen Shop.

     Black Convocation

Poem.

clarity about this very real figment

of my imagination is

not possible,                      (pigment)

actually, I don’t want to think

I don’t want to think about this

these problems never go away

I’m not black my name’s OJ

        okay

I can’t breathe

I can’t breathe

I can’t breathe 

        okay

Poem.

Not everything coheres.

          Remember: not everything

                         coheres

Poem. 

Regret is such a useless thing

I’d so prefer it, if

you did not, look!,

                    at me

                    that very

                        , if

regret is such a useless thing

why preface it with the word

              (poem)

why preface it with eyes.

I will never forget the word

-even if it messes my head. 

          

Poem.

I mean, yes, of course, yes

I’m so, so hungry

but I will not eat you, no, not

no, of course, not like that.

      I otherwise like you,

                I promise. 

Poem. 

A few more words about: coherence, 

it doesn’t exist for me, I’m so hungry

for everyone else and their platitudes.

It must be nice to avoid existential breathlessness.

I like that word: breathlessness.

I resent that platitude: existential.

I am not bitter, I promise.

It’s just that the air…

it tastes so…

                      …(blue.)

Poem.

I don’t believe in you but

                             your face.

***

     Ramen Shop

Poem.

Tomatoes are nice 

fruits or vegetables, I like them.

I eat now. It is nice.

Cheese has a fullness.

Meat a warm blankness.

And my tongue- 

The business of living makes me be.

And it is often simple,

         I would cry.

         Could, but can't,

         I could.

Poem.

Okay, so, that didn't bother me that much

anyway, people are nightmares,

but that's okay, okay?

that wasn't even the problem.

I think it was the gleam,

ass-light.

People think that there's a sun,

a whole ball of it,

up their asses.

So, yeah, it's hard to say:

maybe you should stuff it

maybe you kinda suck.

There was another light.

It wasn't so bad. 

I sort of liked it.

It was nice.

It didn't wake me too harshly.

How can I explain:

     stained glass, church

     small solution, math book

     small ocean, vagina

     curved shaft, penis 

that sort of thing. I guess.

the perfect sunny of not giving a fuck.

     

Poem.

People are enthusiastically boring

I wish I could get more sleep

Sex isn't interesting: neither are my hands

It doesn't matter when you cum

I believe in the Bible once

Physics doesn't make much sense to me

I'm saying that I tried

I don't like the sort of questions you ask me

Ask better questions

Maybe one day people might fit together

until then, please, ask better questions

Poem.

I'm like, one person

How is there never enough space for me

You talk and your mouth is...

listen, I'm like one person

The air sort of passes by

from time to time

        sort of how

your mouths do. 

Whose mouth was first on whom?

I thought it would feel better.

You asked more than once,

if it feels good. Stop

asking questions that aren't 

                 good. Stop,

no, not like that. Yes,

       maybe like that.

Eternal Ramen.

I did finally make it into said literary magazine after actually completing the comp. This piece is from the first round of round two of said comp. As for how I'm feeling now... lol, things got worse actually, but that's okay. Again, not edited, so pardon what follows. 

Eternal Ramen.

Can I talk to you about something?  

There was once a time, not too long ago, and by which I mean less than a month ago, in which I would tell people that the only thing I truly loved in the world was a Japanese noodle dish. Ramen.  One day, while watching the first specks of snow descend outside my dorm-room window, I had an epiphany. Ramen is the only thing that makes me want to continue living. Perhaps it was during one of those days in which I was late for my Japanese class and hadn't yet memorized the words that would be on the ever-impending vocabulary quiz. If it was one of those days, then I most certainly skipped that class, and that quiz, and ran wild across the street to go get ramen.  I hear people do things like that when they're in love.

"Believe it!"

I want you to know that I wasn't always like this. There were other things that I used to love besides noodles bathed in steam-water. What were the things that I used to love? That slow time in the world, back home, when my old music teacher asked me a question at a parents-teacher conference.

What's your most favourite sound in the world?

She listened.

Soft piano keys.

I think that day it rained. The soil squished soft and new. Perhaps an even slower time, it felt quicker then, with another old music teacher. The marimba band was playing in assembly. I heard his voice croak soft and new at the back of the stage. He cha-cha'd with shakers in both his hands. If the skin of the shakers split, his palms would have been filled with dried fruit seeds. Not too long after- those hands, those palms- he turned into soil. When was the funeral? The slowest time: the present: a different country: the hot fog of noodles in my face. The chopsticks dive into the boiling spring. I don't want you to ask me how many times this month. I wasn't always like this. I promise. Maybe I was worried about turning twenty. Maybe it was because I started college and college is hard. Maybe it was because, after more than a year here, I still don't understand you America.

"Believe it!"

America, did you ever watch Naruto? It’s an anime about the number-one hyperactive knucklehead ninja, Naruto Uzumaki! He lives in the Hidden Leaf Village but wears a bright orange jumpsuit. His name is Japanese but he has blonde hair and blue eyes. He starts off by being the worst ninja in the Hidden Leaf but works hard and becomes the best ninja in the world. His favourite food is ramen. On a little box on one of my college applications that asked, 'Who inspires you the most?' I skipped through Obama and Einstein and Aung San Suu Kyi and Socrates and Buddha and typed up, quietly, 'Naruto Uzumaki', clicked the 'submit' button and gave a little fist pump and felt my eyes glitter. During that slow time my sister and I were visiting my uncle and aunt in Toronto, who both haven't been home for god-knows-how-long and their kids don't know where they come from, and spent the weeks before the application deadline watching Naruto with my twelve-year old cousin on his bed. Outside, it snowed and snowed thicker than my dreaming eyes could process.  Inside the Netflix world, Naruto is fighting Gaara, a lonely emo kid from the Hidden Sand Village during the Chunin Exams, the qualifying process for all aspiring ninjas. Both of them grew up without parents. Naruto has turned the pain from his orphanhood into an unshakable desire to make his whole village recognize him as a great ninja, despite his incompetence. Gaara, meanwhile, wants to kill everything he regards as weak and unfit to bear the pain of life, of existence itself. For him, this includes Naruto, who he is beating to a bloody pulp across the little laptop screen. With their fists, two prepubescent boys debate the philosophies of men. Gaara stares coldly while Naruto lifts his frail, crumpled body from the ground to keep fighting.  The number-one hyperactive knucklehead ninja says something to the effect of how he will never give up. How he will become the best ninja in the Hidden Leaf village. He gives a little fist pump and his eyes glitter. He then says those magic words, the words that we hear in every episode, but still my heart and my little cousin's heart murmur in inspired acknowledgment. Believe it. The episode ends. I imagine that a few episodes later he will return to the local ramen stand in his village and slurp his noodles in triumphant victory, as he must. Naruto resolves to never give up, to always keep fighting. My little cousin and I resolve to go get some ramen.

"Believe it!"

When one is about the same age as my little cousin, it is easy to believe that the life trajectory of Naruto is realistic and replicable. I suppose this is why, for him, our venture to go and cop some ramen would merely be finding a fun, anime-inspired meal; whereas for me it would feel like a pilgrimage.  There is unique logic that supports this. He is still young enough to hope that the world will be filled with the possibility of constant ninja-like self-improvement. The bowl of ramen in front of him, the same favorite food of our shared hero, is a signifier of this possibility. If it exists in that world surely it can exist in this world too. I am a little less young enough to see that these worlds don’t quite intersect in this way. But. For me, the ramen bowl is not just a signifier of  a world of ninjas- it is the world of dreams itself. For me, somehow, that bowl is everything that exists only in the world of possibility, all at once, never again. It exists in that world, but it exists only for a moment in this one.  This desperate feeling cannot be experienced through the two minute sachet-and-packet variety of ramen. It is only available through ramen prepared by intensely sweating Japanese men-amongst-all-men. And once I slurp up the last noodle, gulp up the last swallow of lukewarm broth; there is nothing left to believe in. Nothing at all. Not even you.

“Believe it!”

I did America, I did. I did believe in you. I believed in your skyscraper skies the same way you believed in your homeless, who beg for dreams outside the ground floor lobby. I believed in your children the same way you believed that your guns would save them, though they shiver under their schools desks while waiting for the bullets to run out.  I believed in your technicolor screens the same way you believed in my monochrome skin, the blackness of which we will both always misunderstand because of how we are made to see it. I believed in you the same way I believed in a certain number-one hyperactive knucklehead ninja, who was written to keep dreaming, no matter what. No matter what.  I believed in you the same way I believed in a bowl of ramen, which I can’t possibly afford another bowl of, but still I slurp, slurp, slurp. Absurd, I know. But.

Would you mind if I talked to you a bit more about it?  

One can think of ramen as a metaphor for the world. How far this metaphor goes depends on the type of broth or the size of the bowl it is contained by.  The broth of being is much. Consider a few examples.  God and the snap of his fingers, or the Big Bang and the four fundamental forces of physics , or the relentless march of evolutionary biology to produce the all-perfect all-environment surviving species- these can all be thought of as analogous to the mighty, universal taste of ramen broth and the way it is made. You toss a bunch of pig bones and salt and boil for hours and hours and hours. God created the world in seven days, the Big Bang happened about 13.6 billion years ago, the first homo sapiens evolved into being about 200 000 years ago- it takes a bit of time for things to turn out the way that they do. How long did it take for Beethoven to compose Symphony No. 9? Years of ego-filled crescendos that beat his ear drums into a silent dull, in which the eternal quiet of deaf nothing consumed him. And then a fight to conduct the scream of a choir unioned with an orchestra that he could not hear. How long did it take for Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Some time arguing with the Pope that he was primarily a sculptor, not a painter, and then a war with the French and then after all that, four more years and a few assistants.  It takes a while for ramen broth to develop its beautiful and characteristic full flavour. Sometimes as long as eternity. One must wait until this broth is ready to transition from meagre soup to life-affirming meal. Only then, America, can you add the noodles.

There exists approximately 220 episodes of Naruto and 498 episodes of its follow up series, Naruto Shippuden.  The anime has been running since 2005. The manga series it is based on consists of 72 volumes of 700 chapters and has been running since 1997, the same year I was born. You, America, have been around since 1776 and have gone through 44 presidents. There exists no clear date of origin of ramen, though the date probably lies somewhere in the early 20th century. Remember: God created the world in 7 days. The Big Bang happened 13.6 billion years ago. Homo sapiens first evolved into being  about 200 000 years ago. This is the broth of the world.  I don’t know when to add the noodles.

***

I just want to point out the somewhat obvious absurdity in the sentence "Ramen is the only thing that makes me want to continue living." At the time of thinking that, I did mean it, but not in the sense that the absence of ramen meant the genuine absence of life for me. It's painfully melodramatic, and is therefore supposed to be taken as a very bad joke. I think I'm funnier than I actually am; I'm the funniest person I know.

Maxwell's Equations

This is the first features piece I wrote while trying out, or as students here say, 'comping' for one of the literary magazines at my college. I made it past the first round, but didn't have enough time to start, let alone finish, my next piece for the final round. I'm giving it another shot this semester and I'm hoping to write about ramen, a beautiful Japanese noodle dish, which just happens to be my only true love and joy in this world. To be honest, this is a draft more than anything else and I intend to revise it someday, but, for now, here it is posted as it was first written. I didn't bother to remove the double-spacing. Here we go America. 

Maxwell’s Equations.

The following are a series of false analogies concerning physics which you do not understand.

I. Gauss's Law

The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.

You were told that your dreams could not fit within the borders of The Continent. This is why the ground beneath your feet has shifted, and why the grass is no longer a parched yellow, but a nourished green. When you were younger than you are now, you dreamt of flying across the Atlantic to come here. The West. You wished to stand under vaulted, collegiate Neo-Gothic structures to breathe the thoughts of long-dead old white men. Now that this has happened, it occurs to you that you might have been trying to age into one of them. This does not equate. What is equal is the following. To the left of the equals sign: in The Continent, the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet are not the same colour as the rest of your skin. To the right of the equals sign: in The West, the rest of your skin is not the same color as the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

You try to explain.

First, you expand the terms on the left side. In The Continent, the palms of your hands stretched towards the sun when it glowed orange towards the evening and swiped across the sky as it purpled. You had shoes, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so the soles of your feet dance with the dust as you tried to awkwardly help your grandfather herd  the cows home. Your grandfather sighed because the rest of your skin screamt ‘city-child.’ Second, you expand the terms on the right. In The West, the rest of your skin is actually your body it its entirety. This body is yours, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so your palms pick cotton and your soles dragged across the Atlantic through slave-ships in the the water instead of commercial airplanes in the sky. But you say it took you three flights to get here.  

You try to explain.

You were taught that your thoughts are electric currents that flow through your neurons. From this you decided that the beginning and end of your everything must reside within this electricity. The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.  Your everything is nothing more and nothing less than the strange happenings between positive and negative charges. This is why you try to explain your home, your body and your skin with physics which you do not understand.

II. Gauss’s Law for Magnetism

There are no magnetic monopoles; the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero.

There are North poles; there are South poles. They pull together if they’re different; they push apart if they’re the same. There is no such thing as a North pole existing without a South pole; there is no such things as South pole existing without a North pole.

You are black.

One night you are at party with faces that look like your and those faces are dancing. You are still. Their legs and arms swish in movements that are not intrinsic to you.  Their breath fills the air and it is thick, heavy and sweaty. The sound of the music is discordant to your ears. This aural landscape is composed of the following image-associations : hoodies, gunshots, fades, kicks, beats. More than a few girls’ asses are placed neatly in front of boys’ crotches and they rotate around one well-oiled joints. This still feels strange to you. Why? Isn’t the music of the diaspora prevalent in The Continent as well?  Back there and then, when the songs of the diaspora rappers and singers spread  through The Continent like wildfire, you figured it might be a way of returning home for them. And they were welcomed even though your body did not let you dance.  Here you are in the West with your brothers and your sisters who were taken away from you- do you not feel welcomed? Are your faces not the same?  Then, are your faces pulled together because you are different, or pulled apart because they are the same?

One afternoon  you are in the freshman dining hall with faces that look like yours and those faces are talking. You all talk about what you want to study. One wishes to study Economics and African Studies to save The Continent. Another wishes to study Medicine  and African-American studies to save The Continent in the West. You say that you want to study Physics and Philosophy because you’re looking for the true nature and structure of reality. They ask you if you’re interested in philosophy from The Continent. You blankly say that, whether we like it or not, the foundation of the modern world was built by philosophers from the West. There is a pause. You are ashamed. You quickly add that the best way of fighting The West is by knowing their ways of thinking directly and hope that this means and proves something.

One day you and a friend walk down stretches of tarred pathway cutting through the grass. Right by the corner between the big old library and your small old dormitory you find that someone has spray-painted something curious on the black tar. Beneath an arrow pointing forward, the words ‘NO N*GAS’ flash in hasty yellow curls. You lie down next to ‘NO N*GAS’ using your backpack as a pillow , relaxedly place your hands at the back of your head and flash your teeth in an aggressive brace-wire smile. You ask your friend to take a picture of this pose for your Instagram. No niggas. No North poles without South poles. No South poles without North poles. There are no magnetic monopoles;  the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero. Surely your blackness is the same as theirs.

III. Faraday’s Law

The voltage induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux it encloses.

“Maxwell’s Equations are a set of four differential equations that describe electromagnetism. One might shudder at first at the word ‘electromagnetism’. What  a strange unification. The world of charges and currents; sparks, fizzes and flashes. The world of poles and magnets; compasses, maps and directions. Brought together. In fact, the forces of electricity and magnetism are essentially the same force. Electricity and magnetism are just manifestations of electromagnetism in itself. Furthermore, a changing magnetic field produces an electric field and a changing electric field produces a magnetic field.”

So you think to yourself.

From the first equation, you showed that the electricity is the blackness in your mind which is tied to The Continent. It will travel with your forever, no matter what space you exist within, because the blackness you carry with you is always proportional to the blackness you were born with. From the second equation, you used magnetism to relate your blackness to the blackness of the diaspora, the blackness of The Continent to the blackness of The Continent in The West. You discovered that even though they appear to be different, they are the same blackness, because one does not exist without the other. The third equation tells you that the blackness in your mind and the blackness of your skin are the same blackness.

You cannot think your way out of your skin.

IV. Ampere’s Law

The magnetic field induced around a closed loop is proportional to the electric current plus displacement current (rate of change of electric field) it encloses.

“Maxwell’s fourth equation is symmetrical to the third equation. So they basically look the same. If you fiddle around with them a bit, and if the current density J is zero, then you can make them look exactly the same. There is then no doubt that a changing electric field produces a magnetic field, or that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field, or that electricity and magnetism basically amount to the same thing, electromagnetism. Another interesting thing that happens if you play around with the equations: you get c: the speed of light.”

So you think to yourself.

You are surprised and astonished and awed at this physics that you do not understand. From it appears a fundamental truth of the universe, the speed of light. It is the fastest anything in this space and time can ever go, the limit of everything that has been, is, and ever will be. And it is the product of your skin.

How beautiful, how terrible, how fast, how slow.

***

P.S The images for the equations are sourced from the Wikipedia page for 'Maxwell's equations'. They're rather well made...